Abstract

The U.S. Census Bureau is modernizing its approach to producing demographic data to more effectively and efficiently meet the growing demand for high quality, comprehensive, and timely official statistics. This panel will introduce four transformation efforts: the Demographic Frame, Enhancing Health Data (eHealth), National Experimental Wellbeing Statistics (NEWS), and the Census Household Panel.

The Demographic Frame is a comprehensive, secure, access-controlled database of person-level data consisting of demographic, social, and economic characteristics of individuals derived from census, survey, administrative, and third-party data sources. The Demographic Frame is facilitating innovations in data collection, processing, analyses, and products for the census and survey programs.

The eHealth program links survey and administrative data to create a Health Frame, which contains detailed physician and business-level information. The Health Frame provides a more comprehensive resource to understand and assess the U.S healthcare system by taking account of the characteristics of individual providers and the organizations they work in.

The NEWS project is improving and expanding estimates of income, poverty, and other measures of economic wellbeing by linking survey, administrative, and commercial data. The initial release addressed biases from unit nonresponse through improved weights, missing income information in both survey and administrative data through improved imputation, and misreporting by combining or replacing survey responses with administrative data.

The Census Bureau Household Panel is a nationally-representative, address-based, probability-based internet panel (including non-internet households) designed to improve representativeness, significantly reduce burden on sampled households, and promote high-frequency data meeting the immediate needs of the U.S. government and public. The Panel facilitates near real-time analysis of national events that may impact social, economic, or demographic characteristics of the population. It also supports research to improve surveys, including testing content changes, alternative methods for enhancing data with administrative and other data sources, and adaptive survey design procedures.