Characteristics of Large Company Respondents to an Economic Survey

• Activity Number: 221
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Monday, August 1, 2011 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Government Statistics
• Author(s): Stephen Keller*+ and Richard S. Hough and Thomas Falconer and Kayla Curcio
• Companies: U.S. Census Bureau and U.S. Census Bureau and U.S. Census Bureau and U.S. Census Bureau
• Keywords: establishment survey ; data quality

Abstract

The Business R&D and Innovation Survey (BRDIS) is a new survey replacing the Survey of Industrial Research and Development(SIRD). The BRDIS was fielded for the first time in 2008. It is conducted under a joint partnership agreement between the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Census Bureau. The survey covers R&D expense, R&D costs funded by others, R&D employment, innovative activities by companies, patents and intellectual property protections. Data are collected from 40,000 private sector companies in the U.S.

The top 500 R&D performing companies account for more than 80% of the total R&D costs in the U.S. It is extremely important to obtain a high response rate with this set of respondents. Thus, a special communication plan was implemented in 2008 for these companies. The plan includes assigning each company to an account manager, one of the survey's analysts at the U.S. Census Bureau's headquarters, who is responsible for a series of communications with the company to assist them. As a result, we have identified several distinct characteristics in these respondents. This paper will examine the impact of these characteristics on survey response and data quality.