Using the American Community Survey for the National Science Foundation's Science and Engineering Workforce Statistics Programs (2008) / Chapter Skim
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4 The ACS and the SESTAT Program
4 The ACS and the SESTAT Program
Pages 33-40
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From page 33... ...
THE ACS AS THE SAMPLING FRAME The questions on the ACS are generally identical to the questions that were on the decennial long form. The most important difference in the two surveys is that the ACS can provide reasonably detailed information about households and individuals each year rather than once a decade. The ACS is conducted every month.
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From page 34... ...
The National Science Foundation (NSF) faces a reliability problem in using the ACS as the NSCG sample frame not because it wishes to produce small-area estimates, but because it needs the ACS sample size for rare populations.
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From page 35... ...
The professional, fully trained Census Bureau interviewers have access to built-in computer edits and questionnaire routing soft ware in the CATI and CAPI instruments, and so they obtain more complete data. Having more complete data means that there is less need for imputation of missing responses to questionnaire items. On the negative side, the National Research Council report points out that a weakness of the ACS is the significantly larger margins of error in its estimates, even when cumulated over 5 years.
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From page 36... ...
The conversion from a decennial long-form-based sampling frame to an ACS-based sampling frame affords an opportunity to reconsider the goals and objectives of this major government data collection program on S&E. In Chapter 7, the committee suggests that NSF conduct such a BOX 4-1 NSF Goals and Objectives for the SESTAT Program • Improve timeliness • Maintain coverage of rare populations with minimal variance • Gain analytical power • Maintain cross-sectional time series • Preserve trend (minimize breaks in time series)
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From page 37... ...
Over time, as the ACS settles into an ongoing mode and responses to the new field-of-degree question become understood, new opportunities to replace some aspects of the current SESTAT Program with more streamlined data collection procedures may emerge. To prepare for these opportunities, the NSF's Division of Science Resources Statistics (SRS)
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From page 38... ...
• If the field-of-degree question on the ACS were categorical rather than open ended, there could be a substantial loss in the useful ness of information about actual fields of degree. Currently, the NSCG distinguishes among more than 140 different fields; mov ing to only seven or eight broad categories would drastically limit the specificity of the data and would probably preclude doing meaningful statistical analysis with only ACS data.
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From page 39... ...
The cost-benefit tradeoffs of Options A and B are a matter for NSF staff to determine. The panel notes, however, that it appears that much of the content of the congressionally mandated reports could be generated from ACS data alone when the ACS has a field-of-degree question, and research outside of NSF using the NSCG data seems to be quite limited.
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From page 40... ...
Given the speed at which the Census Bureau makes the ACS data available, the NSF staff will undoubtedly want to make use of the ACS data in the preparation of the congressionally mandated reports, no matter which option is chosen. Continued use of the NSCG or something like it would involve additional costs, but it would provide for the greatest continuity and provide much more detailed information about the experiences of the S&E workforce.
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