Walsh, Elliot
Hest, Robert
Stewart, Andrea

Survey Data Season Essentials: ACS vs CPS: What Is the Difference Between These Two Federal Surveys?

This post is a part of our Survey Data Season series where we examine data from various surveys that are released annually from the summer through early fall. Find all of the Survey Data Season series posts on our Survey Data Season 2024 page here.

Each year, SHADAC covers the data releases of multiple federal surveys from a variety of agencies, beginning with the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) in June continuing through the release of Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement (CPS ASEC) and American Community Survey (ACS) data products in September through January.

Recently, survey data from both the 2024 Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement and the 2023 American Community Survey were released. While these two surveys overlap in a number of topics and similarities, they are also distinct in what they measure and how. 

In this blog, we will discuss the similarities and differences between two of the biggest federal survey resources available: the ACS and the CPS ASEC.

Which Federal Agencies Conduct the CPS and the ACS?

The United States Census Bureau has conducted the Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement (CPS ASEC) since 1947 and the current iteration of the American Community Survey (ACS) since 2005 (though Census has conducted similar, prototype ACS surveys since 2000).

The Current Population Survey is jointly sponsored by the Census Bureau and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

When Are CPS and ACS Data Released?

Single-year data from the two surveys is released annually in the second week of September, with supplemental materials for the ACS - such as the Public Use Microdata Sample or “PUMS” files, and the 5-year combined estimates - released later in the year. 

Find the survey data release schedules for these and other survey data resources on our Survey Data Season page. 

Can You Combine or Compare Multiple Years of ACS or CPS Data?

Yes - you can combine and/or compare multiple years of ACS data*. Along with 1-year ACS data files released in September, the Census Bureau has also released 5-year ACS data files annually in December since 2009.

Yes - you can generally combine and/or compare multiple years of CPS data. Care should be taken in combining or comparing across CPS data years, as the survey methodology has been revised numerous times throughout its history. Additionally, because some of the same individuals are surveyed across two CPS data years, researchers should think carefully about how to treat those repeated observations.

On SHADAC’s online data tool, State Health Compare, multiple measures utilize ACS or CPS data that allow users to compare years, trends, and more. We will go over some specific examples of how we use ACS and CPS data later in this blog.

*Except 2020 data, for which the COVID-19 pandemic majorly impacted data collection and distribution efforts. These data are considered “experimental only” and should not be compared to or combined with other years of data. However, the Census Bureau notes that the 5-year files that have the 2020 data year within them are okay for normal use.

Design Differences Between the CPS and the ACS

While both of these surveys are conducted by the Census Bureau, they differ in design, methods, measures, and more. The table below provides an overview of some of the most major differences.

*Geographic level available for data breakdowns - i.e., CPS data is available for the U.S., by region (Midwest, South, Northeast, West) and for states. 

^In-person (ACS & CPS) and mailing activities (ACS) were halted in March 2020. Both resumed in limited capacity in July 2020, and in-person activities resumed fully in September 2020 while mailing activities resumed fully in April 2021.

✝ 2020 data are experimental release only and should not be compared to other years of data.

What Do the ACS vs CPS Measure?

Both the ACS and the CPS gather information on a wide variety of measures.

According to its page on the Census Bureau website, the Current Population Survey, “[provides] information on many of the things that define us as individuals and as a society – our work, our earnings, and our education. In addition to being the primary source of monthly labor force statistics, the CPS is used to collect data for a variety of other studies that keep the nation informed of the economic and social well-being of its people.” 

Specifically, the CPS collects data on measures like:

• Health insurance coverage
• Unemployment
• Labor force participation rate
• Employment data (occupation, industry, class of worker)
• Employment-population ratio
• Child support
• School enrollment
• Demographic data collection (age, race, sex, gender, etc.)

According to its page on the Census Bureau website, the American Community Survey, “helps local officials, community leaders, and businesses understand the changes taking place in their communities. It is the premier source for detailed population and housing information about our nation.”

Specifically, the ACS collects data on measures like:

• Health insurance coverage
• Jobs and occupations
• Educational attainment
• Information on veterans
• Whether people own or rent their homes
• Employment status 
• Disability information
• Housing costs 
• Demographic data collection (age, race, sex, gender, etc.)

You can learn more about the specific questions & measures on the American Community Survey, and why they are asked, on the “Why We Ask Each Question” page on the Census Bureau website.

As you can see, both surveys collect data on similar topics: housing, income, insurance coverage, demographic information, employment, education, and more. A key difference between these two sources is that the ACS provides us with both national and state-level data and estimates for these measures (in addition to lower levels of geography), while the CPS mainly focuses on national-level data.

ACS vs CPS: Guidance on When to Use Each Source 

Knowing what survey data to use depends on what you’re looking at, what measures you’re interested in, the years you’re looking at, and more. The table below guides you through common uses of ACS and CPS survey data, and when to use which source.
 

* While the ACS began in 2005, health insurance coverage questions were not added until 2008.
✝ Except 2020 data, which were “experimental” and should not be compared to other data years.

How Does SHADAC Use ACS and CPS data?

One of the main ways that SHADAC uses the data from these surveys is for our health insurance coverage estimates. These two sources are essential for how SHADAC estimates uninsurance, public insurance, and private insurance coverage rates, including providing information on health insurance coverage nationally, by state, and by demographic categories like race and ethnicity, income, age, and more.

Using the latest 2023 data released in September 2024 from each of these two surveys, SHADAC researchers created two resources explaining overall health insurance coverage estimates. Some of our main findings from these data sources this year include:

• a stable national uninsurance rate for the total U.S. population in 2023 
  • at 7.9% according to the ACS (compared to 8.0% in 2022) 
  • at 8.0% according to the CPS (compared to 7.9% in 2022)
• the rate of uninsurance among children (age 0-18) rose significantly 
  • to 5.8% in 2023 from 5.4% in 2022 according to CPS data
  • to 5.4% in 2023 from 5.1% in 2022 according to ACS data

Read the details on our findings from these two surveys at the links below:

CPS ASEC: 2023 National Health Insurance Coverage Estimates Remain Steady for Adults but Rise for Children

2023 ACS: After Two Years of Decline, Uninsured Rates Increased for Children; Public and Private Coverage Rates See Variations Across the States

SHADAC also uses the wide variety of measures and data available from these surveys on our State Health Compare tool. This online and interactive data tool allows users to create customized data sets and visualizations of state-level health estimates for a number of measures under many categories, including measures on:

• Health Insurance Coverage
• Access to Care
• Cost of Care
• And more

Take a look at the measures available on our State Health Compare (SHC) site that use data from the ACS and CPS!

Measures that Use ACS Data on SHC

Click on any of these measures to explore the data on State Health Compare.

Health Insurance Coverage Type

Percent of adults with fair or poor health status

Percent of households with a broadband internet subscription

Percent of children considered to be poor (<100% FPG)

Income inequality (Gini Coefficient)

Percent of cost-burdened rental households

Measures That Use CPS Data on SHC

Click on any of these measures to explore the data on State Health Compare.

Health Insurance Coverage Type

Percent of people with a high medical cost burden

Median Medical Out-of-Pocket Spending

Percent of adults with fair or poor health status

Have you used State Health Compare to explore data and delve into health care topics? Share your work and tag us on LinkedIn - we love to see how people use SHC to make connections, identify gaps, and work towards making health care accessible & affordable for all people. You can also e-mail us at shadac@umn.edu - we would love to connect!

Stay Updated with SHADAC’s Survey Data Season Series

Stay up to date on our Survey Data Season series, with more Essentials blogs like this one along with other products analyzing newly released data, by signing up for our newsletter and following us on LinkedIn.

New Brief from SHADAC and UMN Cannabis Research Center: Using the Minnesota Student Survey to understand cannabis use and perceptions among high school students

As of 2023, Minnesota legalized cannabis for non-medical use by adults, becoming one of the now 24 states with such policies. Minnesota’s cannabis legislation limits legal cannabis use to adults aged 21 and older, similar to other states’ legislation for cannabis, tobacco, and alcohol use as well. 

Despite the legislation prescribing this age restriction, many policymakers and other stakeholders are concerned with the impact legalized cannabis could have on public health in general and on youth populations, specifically. 

“As cannabis policy continues to develop in Minnesota, and once legal sales of cannabis begin, it will be crucial to study youth cannabis use and to use those findings to fine-tune the state’s approach to minimize public health risks for youth,” says SHADAC and Cannabis Research Center (CRC) researcher Colin Planalp.

Commercial sales of legal cannabis in Minnesota have not yet begun, and they are not expected until 2025. However, the Cannabis Research Center (CRC) and SHADAC — both centers housed at the University of Minnesota’s School of Public Health — have already begun work to understand potential effects this legislation could have on youth. In fact, researchers purposefully wanted to start research and use data from before the beginning of commercial sales in order to provide key baseline evidence on cannabis use and perceptions among youth.

Thus, in their newest brief, researchers from the CRC and SHADAC used data from the Minnesota Student Survey (MSS) to study youth experiences with and perceptions of cannabis and other substances prior to legalization. This brief specifically looks at:

• Self-reported cannabis use
• Differences between demographic groups’ cannabis use
• Perceived prevalence of cannabis use by peers

You can read the brief in full here or by clicking the image to the right.

Interested in Minnesota cannabis policy? Want to learn more about the potential public health implications of cannabis use and legalization? Check out some of SHADAC and the CRC’s other collaborative pieces:

• Accompanying Blog: Using the Minnesota Student Survey to understand cannabis use and perceptions among high school students
• Brief: Public Health Implications of Cannabis Policy in Minnesota
• Brief: Perceptions and Opinions Relating to Cannabis in Minnesota

Perceptions and Opinions Relating to Cannabis in Minnesota

Using data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), this brief explores people’s perceptions and opinions related to cannabis and cannabis use prior to its 2023 legalization in Minnesota. The brief begins with an overview of the context of cannabis policy and use in the United States before moving into analysis of perceptions on cannabis prior to legalization. Specifically, researchers analyzed respondents’ opinions on:

• How easy or hard it would be to obtain cannabis
• Perceived risk associated with smoking cannabis
• Disapproval (or lack thereof) of cannabis use by adults (age 18+) and youth (age 12-17)

Researchers from the University of Minnesota School of Public Health’s State Health Access Data Assistance Center (SHADAC) and Cannabis Research Center (CRC) present data on these three topics for Minnesota specifically and for the U.S. as a whole.

Examining data prior to legalization helps both researchers and the public understand Minnesota’s perceptions and attitudes surrounding cannabis before policy changes – then, as we move forward, we can compare this to post-policy data to understand what has changed, what hasn’t changed, and, hopefully, begin to answer common questions regarding cannabis use and legalization.

Will cannabis use increase with legalization? Will increased consumption lead to greater public health harms? Will rates of use increase for youth? Will perceived risk of use decrease with legalization?

“The answer [to these questions] may depend, in part, on whether the changing legal status of cannabis also changes social norms and people’s perceptions about cannabis, such as reducing social stigma associated with cannabis use,” says SHADAC and CRC Researcher Colin Planalp.

The data in this brief are intended to provide information to Minnesota policymakers as they set up the state’s regulatory framework surrounding cannabis. It also aims to give Minnesotans helpful information as they navigate the new choices that come with the lifting of decades of cannabis prohibition.

Continued research and monitoring of these and other issues will be crucial as cannabis policy, attitudes, and social norms evolve. Examining and understanding these opinions and perceptions can potentially reveal hints at how the cannabis landscape may change as a result of legalization.

Read the brief in full here. Additionally, SHADAC and the CRC authored a companion brief using the same survey data to examine the potential public health implications of cannabis policy in Minnesota. You can find that brief here.

Interested in learning more about cannabis policy in Minnesota, substance use, and related topics? Check out the following resources:

• SHADAC blog accompanying this brief - “Measuring Perceptions and Opinions on Cannabis Use in Minnesota” 
• Brief on the United States Opioid Crisis – “Opioid Crisis in the Pandemic Era”
• Cannabis Research Center Website
• Explore data on the topic of substance use, alcohol-involved deaths, and more on State Health Compare

 

Planalp, Colin
Research Fellow

p 612-624-4850
e cplanalp@umn.edu

Measuring Perceptions and Opinions on Cannabis Use and Access in Minnesota

Even before legalization, most Minnesotans reported that cannabis was easy to obtain; only one-third disapproved of use by adults

During the past decade, the United States’ cannabis policy landscape has changed dramatically. By the end of 2023, 24 states had legalized cannabis for non-medical use by adults — meaning the majority of the U.S. population lives in a state with legalized recreational cannabis.

These changes in the landscape of U.S. cannabis policy have coincided with evolving public opinion and perceptions about cannabis and cannabis legalization. Researchers have documented changing public attitudes about cannabis policy. For example, according to the polling firm Gallup, the share of people in the U.S. who support legalization of marijuana has grown from 50% in 2012 to 70% in 2023, just over a decade later¹. But the complexities of cannabis and the attitudes surrounding it are much more nuanced than simply whether people support or oppose cannabis legalization.

In 2023, Minnesota became the 23^rd state to legalize cannabis for non-medical use by adults. To help policymakers and Minnesotans understand the potential public health implications of that policy change, researchers from the University of Minnesota School of Public Health’s State Health Access Data Assistance Center (SHADAC) and the newly formed Cannabis Research Center (CRC) have analyzed data on people’s perceptions and opinions relating to cannabis, both for Minnesota and the U.S. as a whole.

SHADAC and the CRC used data from the federal government’s National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH). This research so far has included a focus on pre-legalization data, to better understand the people’s perspectives, opinions, and experiences with cannabis before Minnesota’s policy shift. Using the NSDUH, we report pre-legalization baseline data on several issues and commonly cited concerns associated with cannabis legalization:

• Ease or difficulty of obtaining cannabis under a policy of prohibition
• Perceived risk of smoking cannabis on a weekly basis
• Disapproval, or lack of disapproval, of cannabis use by adults (age 18 and older) and youth (age 12-17)

These particular measures are important because they may offer hints about the potential public health effects of cannabis legalization. Much of the concern about legalization hinges on the assumption that it will increase cannabis use, in turn resulting in possible consequences such as increases in prevalence of cannabis use disorder. But is it not clear whether legalization will increase cannabis use in the Minnesota context, or whether increased cannabis use will result in subsequent harms. 

Data on Minnesotans’ perceptions and opinions of cannabis can offer us clues as to how legalization might affect the state. In our analysis, we found that most Minnesotans age 12 and older reported that cannabis was very or fairly easy to obtain, even before it was legalized. That could mean that increased availability of cannabis through legalization might not have a substantial impact on use, as people already reported easy availability when cannabis was prohibited.

We also found that roughly half of Minnesotans believed that smoking cannabis once or twice a week carried no risk or only slight risk of harm. And, while our analysis found that only one in three Minnesota adults (age 18 and older) reported disapproving of adults using cannabis, four in five Minnesota youth (age 12 to 17) said they disapproved of peers using cannabis. That suggests that adults may be less inhibited to try cannabis than youth under legalization — though those attitudes could change.

Our plan is to continue monitoring the cannabis landscape in Minnesota, measuring the impacts of legalization and the consequences — positive or negative — for public health. The findings of this study offer us early hints, but it will be crucial to continue to research these issues once commercial sales of cannabis begin and as new data become available.

Find more details and data analysis in the full version of this brief by clicking on the image to the right, or at the link here.

Interested in Minnesota cannabis policy and research? Check out the following resources to learn more about this growing field:

• Companion Brief: Public Health Implications of Cannabis Policy in Minnesota
• Cannabis Research Center Website

SHADAC Staff

p 612.624.4802
e shadac@umn.edu

FPG vs. FPL: What's the Difference?

This blog was originally posted on April 18, 2023 and updated on April 3, 2024

The terms "FPG" and "FPL" are often used interchangeably, but they are not actually the same thing; there are, in fact, important functional differences between the two concepts.

The federal poverty level (FPL) is the income threshold below which a “family,” and every individual in it, is considered to be in poverty.¹ The poverty definition is based on money income before taxes and does not include capital gains or non-cash benefits. The official FPL is calculated annually in order to reflect inflation by the Census Bureau and is used primarily for statistical purposes—for example, to estimate the number of Americans in poverty each year. The Census Bureau assigns each person or family a singular threshold out of a possible 48, which can vary by family size (designated up to a nine-person family unit or more), number of children, and—in the case of one-person and two-person households—elderly status. The FPL is the same, however, for all 50 states and the District of Columbia (D.C.).

Table 1. Poverty thresholds for 2023 by size of family and number of related children under 18 years ($)

Source: U.S. Census Bureau. (2024). Poverty thresholds.
Note; The source of the weighted average thresholds is the 2024 Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement (CPS ASEC). 

The federal poverty guideline (FPG) is a poverty threshold issued by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) for administrative purposes—for example, determining financial eligibility for federal programs. FPG, like FPL, varies by family size. However, elderly status is not considered in FPG calculations. Additionally, FPG is not uniform nationally: The 48 contiguous states and D.C. use the same FPG, while Alaska and Hawaii each have their own FPG. Reflective of new administrative practices for the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) during the 1966-1970 period, separate guidelines were established for Alaska and Hawaii. Other U.S. territories, such as Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, for instance, do not have separate guidelines, and FPG determinations use either the rate for the 48 contiguous states or some other calculation made by local program officials.

Table 2. 2024 Poverty guidelines (FPG) ($) 

Source: Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE). Poverty Guidelines. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). https://aspe.hhs.gov/topics/poverty-economic-mobility/poverty-guidelines

Ultimately, FPL and FPG identify different numbers of people below the same poverty threshold, with FPG generally placing more people in lower poverty categories than FPL. Additionally, the two measures are released at different times relative to the year to which they apply: The Census Bureau issues its final FPL calculations in the year after the year for which poverty is being measured (e.g., the 2022 FPL, which reflects the calendar year 2022, was issued in April 2023). FPG, on the other hand, is issued by HHS in late January after the year for which poverty is being measured but is named for the year in which it is released (e.g., the 2024 FPG was issued in January 2024, but reflects price changes through calendar year 2023 only). Although the naming conventions for the FPL and the FPG seem to reflect different years, they do, in fact, provide measures for the same year and are therefore comparable.

Current and future eligibility for Medicaid is based on FPG, as are the exchange-based, cost-sharing, and premium subsidies that take place under the federal Affordable Care Act (ACA). Given that these programs affect a substantial and growing number of people, it is important to acknowledge that FPG is distinct from FPL in ways that have significant ramifications on a practical level.

Sources on FPL and FPG

Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE). Poverty Guidelines. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
https://aspe.hhs.gov/topics/poverty-economic-mobility/poverty-guidelines

Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE). Poverty guidelines, research, and measurement. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
https://aspe.hhs.gov/topics/poverty-economic-mobility/poverty-guidelines/prior-hhs-poverty-guidelines-federal-register-references 

U.S. Census Bureau. Poverty Thresholds.
https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-poverty/historical-poverty-thresholds.html

U.S. Census Bureau. How the Census Bureau measures poverty.
https://www.census.gov/topics/income-poverty/poverty/guidance/poverty-measures.html