IMPROVING OUR AGRICULTURAL STATISTICS PROGRAM THROUGH EASY AND FAST ACCESS BY EMPLOYEES TO PREVIOUS SURVEY AND CENSUS DATA
Jack Nealon, Martha Farrar · 2000
Changes in the agricultural industry and the increased demand for data have resulted in the need to collect more data from fewer farm operators. The challenges of maintaining high response rates with increased respondent burden and of satisfying the rising expectations from data users for improved accuracy in agricultural statistics have caused NASS to re-evaluate its entire survey process. Can response rates be improved by making better use of information from previous survey contacts? Can individualized questionnaires be developed to help ease respondent burden? Can we more effectively detect survey-to-survey data inconsistencies and measure change by making it easier to compare current and previous data responses? NASS believes the answer to these questions is “Yes”, and the solution is to provide all employees easy and fast access to previous survey and census data. NASS has developed an integrated, easy to use, and high performance Data Warehouse (DW)System. This system already contains over 700 million records of survey and census data from farm operators and is providing improvements to our agricultural statistics program. Many more improvements will occur as NASS’s sampling, survey management, data collection, data editing, data analysis, and estimation systems are fully integrated with the DW. This paper discusses the critical need in NASS for easy and fast data access by employees, the design of NASS’s DW System, and the central role the DW will play in NASS’s future survey and census program.