Nonresponse and Coverage Bias in the Household Pulse Survey: Evidence from Administrative Data

Jonathan Eggleston and Carl Lieberman

Working Papers from U.S. Census Bureau, Center for Economic Studies

Abstract: The Household Pulse Survey (HPS) conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau is a unique survey that provided timely data on the effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on American households and continues to provide data on other emergent social and economic issues. Because the survey has a response rate in the single digits and only has an online response mode, there are concerns about nonresponse and coverage bias. In this paper, we match administrative data from government agencies and third-party data to HPS respondents to examine how representative they are of the U.S. population. For comparison, we create a benchmark of American Community Survey (ACS) respondents and nonrespondents and include the ACS respondents as another point of reference. Overall, we find that the HPS is less representative of the U.S. population than the ACS. However, performance varies across administrative variables, and the existing weighting adjustments appear to greatly improve the representativeness of the HPS. Additionally, we look at household characteristics by their email domain to examine the effects on coverage from limiting email messages in 2023 to addresses from the contact frame with at least 90% deliverability rates, finding no clear change in the representativeness of the HPS afterwards.

Date: 2024-10
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https://www2.census.gov/library/working-papers/2024/adrm/ces/CES-WP-24-60.pdf First version, 2024 (application/pdf)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cen:wpaper:24-60

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