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In January through March of 2006, the American Community Survey (ACS) conducted the first test of new and modified content since the ACS reached full implementation levels of data collection. The results of that testing will determine the content for the 2008 ACS. To meet the primary objective of the 2006 ACS Content Test, analysts evaluated changes to question wording, response categories, instructions, or examples relative to the current version of the questions.
Military Service-Connected Disability Rating
The objective for including the topic of military service-connected disability rating in the 2006 American Community Survey (ACS) Content Test was to test whether the ACS could provide useful estimates of civilian veterans by the disability-rating categories of
the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). The VA uses a priority system to allocate health care services among veterans enrolled in its programs. An enrollee’s service-connected disability rating is a key factor in determining the person’s eligibility and order of priority for health-care services. To guide them in estimating the demand for their health care services, the VA needs data on the distribution of the veteran population by level of disability rating, and they need to be able to relate this information to information about other characteristics such as income. The desired information on ratings requires a degree of detail expressed by the following six categories: No rating; 0 percent rating (which is different from the category “No rating”); 10 or 20 percent rating; 30 or 40 percent rating; 50 or 60 percent rating; 70 percent or higher rating.
The two versions of the item in the Content Test represent different approaches to collecting the data. We tested whether either or both versions could successfully collect the required information on the topic, and, if so, which could do it better. Each version had two parts: the rating status part asked whether the respondent had a service-connected disability rating; the rating percent part asked respondents who had a rating to quantify it. These parts are the necessary components of the identification of a respondent’s disability-rating level.The versions used the same question for rating status. For rating percent, Version 1 used a separate question that asked the respondent to classify their rating into one of five ranges of ratings; Version 2 indirectly asked the respondent to write in the rating in an open-ended format.
Version 1 met the criteria for each of the three research questions for both the rating status and rating percent components. Version 2 failed to meet the criteria for the first research question; the failure was severe enough to remove it from any further consideration for use in the ACS. Version 1's results were reasonably, if not ideally, comparable with benchmark data from VA administrative data and from the CPS. The Content Test results indicate that Version 1 is capable of producing useful data on service-connected disability-rating levels.
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