Electronic Data Collection and Corresponding Reduction in Edit Rates in the Annual Survey of Entrepreneurs

• Activity Number: 509 - Methodological Innovations and Applications in Government Statistics
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 2, 2017 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Government Statistics Section
• Author(s): Elizabeth Goldberg*
• Companies: U.S. Census Bureau
• Keywords: edit ; electronic data collection ; survey of business owners ; annual survey of entrepreneurs ; census

Abstract

The Survey of Business Owners and Self-Employed Persons (SBO) is conducted every five years as part of the Economic Census and provides the government and data user community with essential data on the economic and demographic characteristics for American businesses and business owners by gender, ethnicity, race, and veteran status. The Annual Survey of Entrepreneurs (ASE) is a companion program to the SBO conducted for survey years 2014 - 2016, which collects similar business owner demographic characteristics for employer only businesses. In contrast to the SBO, the ASE has utilized an electronic only collection mode. In addition to cost reductions related to the elimination of paper forms, this collection mode change has allowed the ASE to greatly reduced data editing rates as compared to the SBO. This paper discussed these reductions, as well as the advantages and challenges related to the movement to a solely electronic data collection mode.