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Evaluations of Imputation Methods to Improve the American Community Survey Estimates of the Group Quarters Population for Small Geographies

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The Census Bureau has recently developed a new methodology to improve the American Community Survey (ACS) estimates of the group quarters (GQ) population for small areas. What motivated this work is that while the ACS GQ sample was designed to produce estimates at the state level, the estimates of the GQ population contribute to ACS estimates of the total resident population for substate areas such as counties and tracts. Consequently, there are small geographies which either do not have GQ sample or have GQ sample that is not representative of the area, which can lead to distorted estimates of characteristics and/or total population for these geographies. The approach taken is to impute whole person records (and weight them appropriately) to selected GQ facilities which appear on the sampling frame but were not selected into sample. This paper examines the results of this method using real ACS data, including comparing the results of the new methodology with those of the current ACS methodology.

Page Last Revised - October 8, 2021
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