1. Electronic Data Reporting and Data Collection Edits at the National Agricultural Statistics Service
United States Department of Agriculture
National Agricultural Statistics Service
A presentation by Dan Beckler for:
UNECE Work Session on Statistical Data Editing: May 16-18, 2005 Ottawa, ON
Slide 1

2. Electronic Data Reporting at NASS
Slide 2
Electronic Data Reporting at NASS
Web & paper questionnaires created with in-house developed Question Repository System (QRS)
Client-server application
Creates properly formatted questions, stored in database, retrieved to produce questionnaires
Maintains a consistency between paper & Web
More efficiently creates questionnaires for the two modes than if done separately
Programming skills not required by QRS users (QRS used by questionnaire designers)

3. Data Collection Edits at NASS
Slide 3
Data Collection Edits at NASS
Edits for CATI (Blaise), Web, and pen-&-paper (by interviewers)
Purpose: collect higher quality data – avoid imputation or burdensome call-backs
Most data are numerical values – (1) range edits, (2) balance edits, (3) relationship edits
Edits are either hard or soft
Subsets of post-data collection edits
Pen-&-paper edits Web edits CATI edits U U