Alternate title: "Whoomp! (There They Went!)"
Phase 1 of the Census Bureau's Pulse Survey, which ended in July, offered a valuable look into the unfolding status of Americans during the COVID19 pandemic. Phase 2 began on August 19, and it turns out that the survey instrument was shuffled and expanded.
As revealed in a tweet by Northwestern's Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, unfortunately this change appears to have increased incompletions and nonresponse a fair amount:
Here's what we've learned so far about the spike in nonresponse in the Census Household Pulse Survey.
— Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach (@dwschanz) September 10, 2020
Of course, I'm focused on the Q on food sufficiency, but it would be straightforward to extend this to other sections. https://t.co/xU4E3kJsvs
I've been interested in the questions in the health module on insurance coverage. And unfortunately the redesign has created a very large discontinuity in the uninsured. Here is a graph of the Pulse data in 2020 showing the percent aged 18+ reporting no health insurance, which dove to 7.7%.
In my earlier post I compared these statistics to readings from the American Community Survey in 2018 and earlier, and they looked pretty good. A next step would be to examine nonresponse and try to get a handle on just how big the bias is for this measure.
