ACS data is used for ....

Here's the "government need to know" for why they ask each question: www.census.gov/.../

Thank you both Diana and Gretchen. I have a meeting this week with people who are not data people and don't seem to have a lot of confidence in the use of ACS data. Just trying to be prepared when they pepper me with questions to defend the use of ACS datasets.

Hopefully it will go better than I expect.

Please let us know how it goes. Do they not have confidence in survey data in general, or just in the ACS? What would they use instead?

I will, the meeting is tomorrow. They are not data people and start getting the deer in the headlight look whenever I start trying to review even basic data points. They are structural engineers from a large construction company that was forced to conduct a study in order to get access to a federal grant. They have been treating the process like they were ordering a report off of Amazon up until recently and then all of a sudden decided they were experts in how to conduct a study. Then, they started trying to micro-manage things they had no business micro-managing.

They really don't understand the difference between one data source over another. They just think producing data is something that just happens magically by a few queries.

I will, the meeting is tomorrow. They are not data people and start getting the deer in the headlight look whenever I start trying to review even basic data points. They are structural engineers from a large construction company that was forced to conduct a study in order to get access to a federal grant. They have been treating the process like they were ordering a report off of Amazon up until recently and then all of a sudden decided they were experts in how to conduct a study. Then, they started trying to micro-manage things they had no business micro-managing.

They really don't understand the difference between one data source over another. They just think producing data is something that just happens magically by a few queries.