U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Department of Labor Logo United States Department of Labor
Dot gov

The .gov means it's official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you're on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Bureau of Labor Statistics > Office of Survey Methods Research > Publications > Browse Research Papers

Assessing the Effect of Government Frame Refinement on Collecting Establishment Data for the National Compensation Survey

Glenn Springer

Abstract

Nonresponse error is a common but undesirable feature of a survey. Survey practitioners use various techniques to reduce non-response error. In the National Compensation Survey (NCS), the state and local government frame is developed using administrative files maintained by the states for unemployment insurance (UI). In this paper, we explore the extent to which a frame refinement process, used to reconfigure UI reporting units so that they conform to how payroll records are kept in an establishment, improved the ability to collect data for the establishment as sampled, thereby improving response as well as reducing respondent burden and the need for post-collection sample-weight adjustment. An overview of the refinement process, the system tool developed for refinement, and several approaches to measuring the impact of frame refinement on non-response will be explored.