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thatkomputerkat@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

I have no confidence in these kinds of surveys. How Are people contacted? What kind of person trusts the purpose of these surveys? I couldn’t find anything in that mountain of text saying how they contact these people. Do you know how many people don’t pick up the phone anymore? Do they only call landlines? Do they mail it out?

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Lyrl@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
The survey design and data collection are described at www.bls.gov/opub/hom/cps/design.htm and www.bls.gov/opub/hom/cps/data.htm

Some excerpts:

The sample is made up of addresses, not the names of people or families at those addresses.

The CPS [Current Population Survey] starts with a probability sample of about 74,000 assigned housing units each month. Approximately 62,000 housing units are eligible for interview each month, after excluding those which are destroyed, vacant, converted to nonresidential use, contain only people whose usual place of residence is elsewhere, or are ineligible for other reasons. Interviews are completed for about 54,000 housing units. In a given month, about 13 percent of housing units are not interviewed, because of the temporary absence of the occupants (they might be on vacation, for example), other failures to make contact after repeated attempts, inability of people contacted to respond, unavailability for other reasons, and refusals to cooperate.

The Census Bureau will contact each household for 8 monthly interviews over a 16-month period.

Personal visits are typically required the first month the household is in the sample, and they are preferred in the fifth month. In other months, interviews generally are conducted by telephone. Households without a telephone and those which specifically request a personal visit usually receive in-person interviews each month. About 10 percent of eligible households are interviewed via computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI) from telephone centers located in Jeffersonville, Indiana, and Tucson, Arizona. Field representatives interview the remaining households (approximately 68 percent of households in any given month) by telephone.

Because of the crucial role interviewers have in the CPS, a great amount of time and effort is spent maintaining the quality of their work. Interviewers are given intensive training, including classroom lectures, discussion, practice, observation, home-study materials, and on-the-job training. Interviewers receive self-study training each month, as well as periodic refresher training sessions. They also are periodically accompanied by a supervisor during a full day of interviewing to determine how well they carry out their assignments.

A selected number of households are reinterviewed each month to detect and deter falsification by interviewers. These reinterviews are conducted by a dedicated staff operating independently of the CPS management structure.

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