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Letter Report to the Census Bureau on the Design for the Accuracy and Coverage Evaluation (ACE) Survey (1999) / Chapter Skim
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Letter Report
Pages 1-7

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From page 1...
... Supreme Court ruling against the use of sampling for reapportionment among the states eliminates the need for a post-enumeration survey that supports direct state estimates, as was originally planned for the ICM survey. (The state allocations of the ICM sample design deviated markedly from a proportional-to-size allocation in order to support direct state 'See National Research Council(1999)
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From page 2...
... Plans for ACE Sample and Post-Stratification Design Our understanding of the current plans for the ACE survey is based on information from Census Bureau staffs Building on its work for the previously planned ICM, the Census Bureau will first identify a sample of block clusters containing approximately 2 million housing units and then will independently develop a new list of addresses for those blocks.3 In a second stage, a sample of block clusters will be drawn from the initial sample to obtain approximately 750,000 housing units, which was the number originally planned for the ICM. (Larger block clusters will not be drawn in their entirety; they will first be subsampled to obtain sampling units of 30-50 housing units.
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From page 3...
... Observations and Comments Sample design to select the 300,000 housing units Because of the need to keep the ACE on schedule by initiating resource allocations that support the independent listing of the 2 million addresses relatively soon, as well as the need to avoid development and testing of new computer software, the Census Bureau has decided to subsample the 300,000 ACE housing units from the 750,000 housing units of the previously planned ICM design. The panel agrees that operational considerations support this decision.
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From page 4...
... Specifically, the Census Bureau should examine the feasibility of combining the currently planned ACE estimates at the state level with the direct state estimates, using estimated meansquared error to evaluate the performance of such a combined estimate in comparison with the currently planned estimates. We understand that the necessity of prespecification of census procedures requires that the Census Bureau formulate an estimation strategy prior to the census, which adds urgency to this issue.
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From page 5...
... Post-stratification plans The 1990 census adjusted counts used 1,392 post-strata, but post-production analysis for calculating adjusted counts for intercensal purposes resulted in the use of 357 post-strata. The panel believes that the use of these 357 post-strata (and the hierarchy for collapsing poststratification cells)
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From page 6...
... Summary From its review of the Census Bureau's current plans for design of the ACE survey, the panel offers three general comments: o The panel concludes that the general nature of the Census Bureau's work on the ACE design represents good, current practice in sample design and post-stratification design and their interactions. 0 The panel recognizes that operational constraints make it necessary for the Census Bureau to subsample the ACE from the previously planned ICM sample.
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From page 7...
... some modifications in the criteria used to evaluate the ACE sample design and post-stratification, namely, lower priority for coefficients of variation for excessively detailed post-strata and more attention to coefficients of variation for substate areas; and (3) a possible change in the ACE estimation procedure, involving use of direct state estimates in combination with the currently planned estimates.
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  • state minima
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  • sampling weights

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  • census procedures
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  • alternative subsample


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