Research for the AASHTO Standing Committee on Planning. Task 71. Disclosure Avoidance Techniques to Improve ACS Data Availability

The American Community Survey (ACS) is expected to deliver tabulations similar to decennial Census "long form" for population characteristics, including workplaces and worker flows between home and work. The ACS is a new Census Bureau program that uses a continuous data collection methodology to replace the traditional decennial "long form" data collection, and should provide small area data nationwide, after 5 years of data accumulation. With the change to the ACS, the Census Bureau Disclosure Review Board is suggesting that they will again implement rounding and thresholds rules as used for Census 2000. Exacerbating the data loss problems under ACS is the fact that ACS has a smaller sample size than the old "long form" methodology, even when data is aggregated over 5-years. Under ACS, the transportation community believes that even more of the flow data will fail to meet the threshold. Because of this potential loss of data, the AASHTO Standing Committee on Planning Census Data Working Group believes that an investigation into the production of high quality synthetic data that both meets the data users' needs as well as satisfying the Disclosure Review Board rules is urgently needed. The objective of this research is to examine the scope of the problem, and attempt to provide methods and techniques to develop a high quality synthetic database for potential use as a special product from the American Community Survey (ACS). This research should result in a standard approach that can be applied across the board instead of limiting the tabulations from the ACS and requiring each Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) or State Department of Transportation (DOT) to create their own routines for synthesizing small area, multivariate tables.

Record URL:

Language

English

Project

Status: Completed
Funding: $75000.00
Contract Numbers:
Project 08-36, Task
Sponsor Organizations:
Federal Highway Administration

1200 New Jersey Avenue, SE
Washington, DC United States 20590

American Association of State Highway & Transportation Officials (AASHTO)

444 North Capitol Street, NW, Suite 225
Washington, DC United States 20001

National Cooperative Highway Research Program

Transportation Research Board
500 Fifth Street, NW
Washington, DC United States 20001
Project Managers:
Srinivasan, Nanda

Sundstrom, Lori
Performing Organizations:
Cambridge Systematics, Incorporated

100 Cambridge Park Drive
Suite 4000
Cambridge, MA United States 02140-2369
Principal Investigators:
Tierney, Kevin
Start Date: 20070901
Expected Completion Date: 0
Actual Completion Date: 20090608
Source Data: RiP Project 15625

Subject/Index Terms

TRT Terms: Census; City planning; Data collection; Metropolitan planning organizations; Public transit; State departments of transportation; Surveying methods and processes
Uncontrolled Terms: Disclosure
Subject Areas: Data and Information Technology; Highways; Planning and Forecasting; Public Transportation; Society;

Filing Info

Accession Number: 01557232
Record Type: Research project
Source Agency: National Cooperative Highway Research Program
Contract Numbers: Project 08-36, Task
Files: TRB, RiP
Created Date: Mar 19 2015 1:01AM