HUD recently issued a Federal Register Notice seeking public comment on the redesign of the American Housing Survey (AHS) for 2015 and beyond. The Notice represents the first opportunity to submit written comments to HUD regarding redesign issues. To get AHS users thinking about issues and ideas, the Notice includes numerous questions for AHS user consideration such as:

  1. Should HUD continue the strategy of core and rotating topical modules?
  2. What content should be included in the core modules, considering that housing characteristics change slowly?
  3. What topics should HUD consider for rotating topical modules from 2015-2019?
  4. What questions should HUD consider reformatting to elicit more accurate responses? For instance, are the questions on utility usage providing accurate information?
  5. What questions in the AHS are duplicative with other surveys and should be under consideration for removal from the survey?
  6. What data collection modes (web, telephone, face-to-face interviews, administrative data matching) should be used, given the secular decrease in response rates in both face-to-face and telephone surveys? How should questions be formulated differently if we anticipate multimode data collection?

HUD strongly urges AHS users to submit written comments by April 2, 2013.

Click here to view the Federal Register Notice.