Producing Control Charts to Monitor Response Rates for Selected Business Surveys of the U.S. Census Bureau

• Activity Number: 542
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 7, 2013 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Government Statistics Section
• Author(s): Yarissa Gonzalez*+ and Broderick Oliver and Katherine Jenny Thompson
• Companies: U.S. Census Bureau and U.S. Census Bureau and U.S. Census Bureau
• Keywords: Control Chart ; Unit Response Rate ; Business Survey ; p-chart ; Quality Control ; Monitoring

Abstract

Business surveys (i.e., programs) in the Economic Directorate of the U.S. Census Bureau compute the unit response rate as part of survey processing. After closeout, this program-level measure is evaluated against a targeted benchmark and serves as an indirect indicator of a program's data quality. Thompson and Oliver (2012) present a different perspective on the usage of unit response rates. They advocate analyzing unit response rates over time using control charts as a means of assessing the stability and capability of the response rate process and modifying it if necessary. In this paper, we discuss why this perspective is appropriate in an ongoing survey setting and describe the challenges involved in developing control charts in this context. We illustrate our proposed control chart and our recommended parameter settings on empirical data from two of our business surveys.