Benefits, Burdens, and Prospects of the American Community Survey Summary of a Workshop (2013) / Chapter Skim
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3 Planning Social Services and Responding to Disasters
3 Planning Social Services and Responding to Disasters
Pages 35-56
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From page 35... ...
Section 3–A summarizes a presentation on the use of the ACS for studying welfare "safety net" policies and its strength relative to other data sources, while Section 3–B outlines the way in which a research organization serves as an "interpreter" of ACS estimates for state and local policy makers. The disaster planning and recovery portion of the session included both a specific example -- work to assess the impacts of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and New Orleans' recovery from those natural disasters (Section 3–C)
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From page 36... ...
.1 This major supplement to the CPS has particular prominence because its information on income in the preceding year is the government's source of its official poverty statistics; echoing Call's description in the previous session, Giannarelli observed that the CPS ASEC has been "the workhorse of federal surveys regarding population issues" for decades, given its inclusion of questions on family structure and demographic issues as well as (dozens of questions on) types of income.
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From page 37... ...
," "any public assistance or welfare payments from the state or local welfare offices," and "any other sources of income" such as veterans' benefits or unemployment compensation.4 Clearly, Giannarelli said, this lack of detail and confounding of different income types is not ideal for safety net analysis -- among other things, the ACS provides no direct insight on income received in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits (formerly called Food Stamps)
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From page 38... ...
periodically asks the Urban Institute to generate state-level estimates of eligibility for federally funded child care subsidies under the Child Care and Development Fund. In the past, this work has required using 2 years of CPS ASEC data to construct the state-level estimates but -- though this work does generate some useful insights -- Giannarelli conceded that the resulting standard errors on the estimates are sufficiently large as to make one question the utility of the estimates for the states.
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From page 39... ...
suggests that the safety net policies serve to cut child poverty rates by half; the bottom graph shows that two specific safety net programs (TANF and SNAP) both serve to reduce the child poverty rate to varying degrees by state.
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From page 40... ...
! Figure 3-1 Effect of welfare "safety net" provisions on child poverty rate, Georgia, Illinois, and Massachusetts, 2008 NOTES: SNAP, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program; SPM, Supplemental Poverty Measure; TANF, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Program.
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From page 41... ...
is a research and evaluation arm of the nonprofit Heartland Alliance for Human Needs and Human Rights in Chicago.9 For more than 12 years, IMPACT has been involved in the generation of an annual Report on Illinois Poverty (the most current version of which is Social IMPACT Research Center, 2011) ; as IMPACT's associate director Amy Terpstra noted in her workshop presentation, IMPACT's work focuses on populations or issues impacting populations who are economically vulnerable or experiencing economic hardship.
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From page 42... ...
In addition to screen display, the site provides users with the capacity to download data tables and to access readymade "fact sheets" for easy reference. Terpstra said that IMPACT and Heartland Alliance are finding that county social service agencies are using this web portal quite extensively.
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From page 43... ...
Illinois Poverty Rates Over Time12 Number 1,112,145 Percent Populations in Poverty, 201013 Percent of Percent of State Number Below the Poverty Percent in Group* Population*
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From page 44... ...
ϐͷͲΨ Ǥ income child poverty Median Household Income in 2010: Child Poverty Rate in 2010: 29.1% $43,792 Ȉ The child poverty rate rose from 28.2% in Ȉ Median household income declinedby ʹͲͲͻǡ
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1.5% from $44,468 in 2009, which is not a change.
ϐ
Ǥ Ȉ The child poverty rate rose from 12.9% in Ȉ Median household income declined by 23.7% ͳͻͻͻǡ
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Ǥ from $57,427 in 1999, which is a statistically ϐ
Ǥ Number of Children in Poverty in 2010: Winnebago County Median Household Income 20,374 Over Time Ȉ The number of children in poverty declined 58000 from 20,872 in 2009, which is not a statistically ϐ
Ǥ 54200 Ȉ The number of children in poverty rose from ͻǡͳͺͳͻͻͻǡ
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50400 change.
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From page 45... ...
The example that Terpstra walked through in this area is work that IMPACT has done for the Greater Chicago Food Depository, one of the numerous social service agencies that make data requests of IMPACT. IMPACT's relationship with the Food Depository goes back many years, and IMPACT has performed many different iterations of the analysis of the need for nutrition support among seniors in Cook County and the city of Chicago.
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From page 46... ...
First, IMPACT does analysis of extreme poverty conditions for the state's Commission on the Elimination of Poverty, beyond the production of the annual poverty report described above. The commission itself was established by the state based on Heartland Alliance's work, noticing an increasing trend in extreme poverty (defined as people with income below 50 percent of the federal poverty level)
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From page 47... ...
As she explained, data from the ACS have proved instrumental and, without ACS data, many constituencies would be "flying blind." Though the Katrina example looms large, Plyer displayed a county-level map, shaded based on the number of times each county had been included in a presidential disaster declaration between 1964 and 2010.11 The red shading on the map -- particularly dense in areas like eastern North Dakota (flooding) , southern California and the Pacific Northwest (flooding and wildfires)
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From page 48... ...
Plyer displayed graphs showing that the GNOCDC website averaged about 5,000 visits per month between August 2003 through July 2005 -- many visitors involved in planning and advocacy activities, as Terpstra described, and many local groups seeking data to support grant applications. That steady state of visitors to the website (and the operations of GNOCDC itself)
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From page 49... ...
As 2006 and 2007 ACS data became available, GNOCDC began to generate series of analyses that it has since updated on an annual basis. For example, the ACS data showed that the populace of Orleans Parish had changed strikingly along some key variables: significantly fewer people who completed a high school degree and fewer households lacking access to a vehicle, a drop in the percentage of population living in poverty, and an uptick in the percentage of foreign-born population.
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From page 50... ...
Post-Katrina, the number of people in poverty in New Orleans dropped significantly because, as Plyer said, "those folks had a hard time returning." But then the poverty rate ticked upward with the national recession. On related lines, GNOCDC began partnering with the Urban Institute to produce a series of housing reports, examining trends in greater New Orleans (principally using ACS numbers)
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From page 51... ...
to their downstream data users.13 3–D FRAMEWORK FOR USING DATA IN DISASTER PREPARATION Closing the session, Russ Paulsen (executive director for community preparedness and resilience, American Red Cross) conceded that his remarks would be unlike other presentations in that they would not be ACS-centric; he said that he would be unable to sort out exactly what information Red Cross derives from the ACS versus the CPS versus any other data source, and that analysts at the American Red Cross national headquarters tend to use data products prepared by outside vendors.
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From page 52... ...
The Red Cross is a broad national organization building on the work of individual chapters, so data from the disaster response stage inform the reports from local chapters and are used by the national headquarters to process local reports and to assess how resources are being allocated throughout the organization. For a particular disaster -- a fairly localized one, like a tornado -- Paulsen sketched the basic way in which data like ACS estimates are used in disaster response.
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From page 53... ...
However, given that Plyer had discussed recovery in great depth, Paulsen moved on in the cycle to discuss the role of data in disaster preparedness. He said that preparedness is his new major focus in work at the Red Cross; having led recovery from Katrina and having worked in disaster response for a long time, he said that he wants to really get ahead of the curve and try to reach a point where people do not have to suffer so much when disasters occur.
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From page 54... ...
Specific demographic variables covered by the ACS that Paulsen suggested are most useful in a pareparedness strategy include total population, age breakdowns, race and ethnicity breakdowns, foreign-born population, language other than English spoken at home, educational attainment, household structure and median household income, percentage living in nonpermanent housing stock (i.e., mobile homes) , percentage lacking phone service, percentage lacking an available vehicle, and percentage unemployed (persons over 16 not in labor force)
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From page 55... ...
15 The American Red Cross provides overview pages on blood types and the rare blood types that vary by race and ethnic origin at http://www.redcrossblood.org/learn-about-blood/blood-types and http://www.redcrossblood.org/learn-about-blood/blood-and-diversity, respectively.
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