Reductions in Reporting Errors in Total Acres Operated: Results from Multiphase Question Testing for the 2012 Census of Agriculture

Multiple phase testing was conducted by the National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) for the 2012 Census of Agriculture (COA) to understand and address misreporting problems in the first two sections of the report form. The first section, Acreage, collects information to determine the total acreage of the entire operation; the second section, Land, collects information to determine how the operation’s acres were used during the census year. The first phase of testing analyzed edit and imputation rates for individual report form items in these two sections for the previous (2007) COA. This led to revisions in the format, wording, and layout of the report form for field testing. The second phase examined a number of different types of errors in the 2010 Census Content Test. The third phase compared error rates between the 2007 and the 2012 COA to determine if the 2012 report form produced fewer reporting errors. The fourth phase consisted of telephone reinterviews with a subsample of respondents to the 2012 COA who misreported data in any or both of these two sections. The multiple rounds of testing and revisions to the Acreage and Land Sections of the 2012 report form did significantly lower the rate of errors in these sections.