Creating Housing Unit Frames from Address Databases

Survey researchers increasingly look to commercially available address databases to create survey frames. These databases offer obvious cost and speed advantages over in-field listing of housing units but rely on geocoding to associate the addresses with census geographies such as tracts and blocks. While much recent research has looked at the coverage of frames derived from these databases, none has specifically explored the contributions of geocoding to frame coverage. Nationally, 83.3% of all residential addresses on the January 2010 Valassis database geocode precisely enough that they are likely to be placed in the correct block. Among the city-style addresses, 93.9% geocode at this level. Comparing the counts of addresses on the database to housing unit counts from the 2010 Census, we find that the national net coverage rate for in-person surveys can vary from 86.7% to 92.3%, depending on which addresses a survey uses on its frame.