Since the start of the American Community Survey (ACS) we have included a Failed Edit Follow-Up Operation (FEFU) to recontact households that returned a mail form with missing data. We send mail forms to FEFU for coverage and content reasons. Coverage follow-up includes mail responses for households consisting of more than five people (there is room on the questionnaire to collect data for only five people), mail responses where the count of people (household size) on the cover page does not equal the number of persons with data on the form, and mail responses that are vacant or temporarily occupied housing units. The workload for content follow-up includes mail responses with varying degrees of missing data, as determined by the criteria in the "€œmail return edit." This evaluation will only explore modifications to the content portion of the mail return edit.

Our goal for content follow-up is to minimize the levels of item nonresponse on mail returned forms. We currently use a method that gives follow up priority to items on the questionnaires that Census Bureau subject matter experts believe to be most important. We assign a priority of "€œcritical", "€œmoderate", or "€œlow" to each question (item) and calculate a summary of the priorities associated with patterns of missing data associated with each mail return. A return becomes eligible for content FEFU when data are missing for:

(A) 2 or more critical priority housing questions (B) 3 or more moderate priority housing questions (C) 11 or more low priority housing questions (D) 2 or more critical priority population questions (E) 3 or more moderate priority population questions (1-person households only) (F) 4 or more moderate priority population questions (2+ person households) (G) 1 critical priority housing question and 1 critical priority population question