Standards for Discussion and Presentation of Errors in Survey and Census Data
Each year the Bureau of the Census publishes a vast number of estimates on many subjects. It is the Bureau's responsibility to inform its data users of the important limitations of the estimates, both those due to sampling and those due to response and other nonsampling errors. The Bureau has developed standards for meeting this responsibility under varying conditions, depending on the type of report involved and on the nature and extent of the information available on the types of errors that affect the published estimates. These standards are contained in Technical Paper 32.1 Because of the basic importance to statistics of such standards and to make them available to a wider audience, this special supplement to the Journal of the American Statistical Association presents these standards for consideration in preparing statistical reports, based on the guidelines developed by the Bureau in its Technical Paper 32. The material presented here is essentially the same as that contained in Technical Paper 32, but rearranged to better suit the needs of the more general user and patron of survey data. In addition to presenting guidelines for consideration in presenting and interpreting survey results, this supplement discusses some relatively simple means of presenting error estimates for published data. This supplement includes illustrations of alternative methods of presenting sampling and nonsampling errors