Hi,
Does the ACS interview people/residents who live in Migrant Farmworker Housing? Migrant family centers are available each year to agricultural workers and their families who migrate from their homes to agricultural areas for seasonal employment. These centers would typically operate for 180 days during a given year.
For more information on what I mean by Migrant Center, see here: https://www.hacsj.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/migrantCenters_v1.pdf
Specifically, I am interested in California. I am using the 5-year ACS sample for reference.
My intuition is that they are included because these workers/people who stay in migrant housing family centers could stay for 180 days, which is more than the “two-month” rule of who counts as a “resident” in a given address. Is this correct?
Thank you in advance.
From the Census Bureau’s glossary of terms, “group quarters are places where people live or stay, in a group living arrangement, that is owned or managed by an entity or organization providing housing and/or services for the residents.” Migrant farmworker housing sounds like a type of group quarters rather than a household. The American Community Survey’s sampling frame has included people living in group quarters since the 2006 survey. You can identify respondents who reside in group quarters in the variable GQ, and the type of group quarters they reside in (institutional versus non-institutional) in the variable GQTYPE.
The Census Bureau’s documentation of the ACS sampling frame does not suggest in any way that these types of group quarters are excluded from the ACS sample. However, I also do not see any explicit mention of migrant farmworker housing in their documentation. Chapter 4 of the Census Bureau publication on the ACS design and methodology states, “GQ facilities include such places as college residence halls, residential treatment centers, skilled nursing facilities, group homes, military barracks, correctional facilities, workers’ dormitories, and facilities for people experiencing homelessness.” So, while I would reasonably expect that migrant farmworker housing would be defined by the Census Bureau as a type of group quarters (perhaps as a type of workers’ dormitory), and therefore individuals living in this type of housing could be sampled in the ACS, I cannot say with certainty whether that’s the case. You may try to identify such individuals using an occupation variable (such as OCC2010) along with GQ and GQTYPE to determine whether a given sample includes any agricultural workers who live in non-institutional group quarters. If such persons are included in the ACS sampling frame, note that their numbers in the ACS will be very few because the ACS is a one percent sample of the U.S. population.