Assessing the Impact of a New Imputation Methodology for the Agricultural Resource Management Survey

• Activity Number: 339
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 5, 2014 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Government Statistics Section
• Author(s): Darcy Miller*+ and Wendy Barboza and Nathan Cruze
• Companies: NASS and USDA/NASS and NASS
• Keywords: imputation ; non-response ; testing

Abstract

The Agricultural Resource Management Survey (ARMS) is conducted by the United States Department of Agriculture's (USDA) National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS), and cosponsored by the USDA's Economic Research Service (ERS). The third phase of the survey, ARMS III, collects data to provide an annual snapshot of the financial health of the farm sector and farm household finances. Currently, unweighted mean imputation within groups is utilized to adjust for item nonresponse. Evaluation of an alternative multivariate imputation technique, Iterative Sequential Regression (ISR), in an operational setting is in progress. The impacts of implementing ISR are assessed in terms of changes in agency workloads and processes, increases or reductions in costs to NASS, and differences in estimates that would be set when using the ISR methodology versus the unweighted mean methodology. The results of this evaluation will be utilized to prepare the research program to move to an operational platform.