• Surveying Households About Education Issues
• Spotlight on NHES Reports
• Use of Telephone Interviews

Historically, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) has collected data from teachers, students, and schools through school-based surveys and from administrative records through surveys of school districts and state education agencies. In 1991, with the initiation of the National Household Education Surveys Program (NHES), NCES broadened its approach to include the collection of education data from households.

NHES defies neat pigeonholing, as it is not limited by institutional reporting and can span a number of topical issues and populations. Using household-based surveys, NHES has the potential to address many issues in education that were not addressed by earlier NCES data collection activities. These issues range from the education and care of young children to the learning experiences of adults throughout their lives. Over the past decade, NHES has surveyed household members about several education-related topics, including parents’ involvement in their children’s education, before- and after-school arrangements, homeschooling, and the civic engagement of young people and adults. By definition, many of these topics are outside the scope of institution-based data collections.

Each cycle of NHES typically includes two to three substantive surveys on education-related topics. The most recent data collection, NHES:2001, included the Adult Education and Lifelong Learning Survey (AELL), the Early Childhood Program Participation Survey (ECPP), and the Before- and After-School Programs and Activities Survey (ASPA). The next collection, NHES:2003, is expected to include the Parent and Family Involvement in Education Survey (PFI) and the Adult Education for Work-Related Reasons Survey (AEWR).

To provide comparative data across survey years, NHES repeats topical surveys on a rotating basis. New topics can be added to the NHES system as particular issues gain importance. In addition, one-time surveys on topics of interest to the Department of Education have occasionally been fielded. Thus, while NHES affords the opportunity for tracking phenomena over time, it is also dynamic in addressing new issues. As new NHES cycles are planned, conceptual and methodological refinements are also incorporated.

This issue of the Education Statistics Quarterly highlights findings from two recent reports that draw on NHES data: Efforts by Public K-8 Schools to Involve Parents in Children’s Education: Do School and Parent Reports Agree? and Participation Trends and Patterns in Adult Education: 1991 to 1999. These two reports-together with Homeschooling in the United States: 1999, a recent report that appeared in the previous issue of the Quarterly-demonstrate the usefulness and the impressive range of NHES data. NHES can be used to shed light on the differences between parents’ perceptions and school officials’ perceptions of the extent to which parent involvement is encouraged and engaged in. It can also fill a data gap with reliable statistics on the extent to which parents opt to homeschool their children and their motivations for this choice. Turning to adult education, it can document developments over time in the extent to which adults participate in both formal and informal learning experiences and their reasons for doing so. Not only does NHES provide the numbers of people participating in various forms of education, but it can also provide some indication as to why people make certain choices.

The NHES design lends itself to collecting detailed information on education issues from a relatively large and targeted sample of households in a timely fashion. Households are selected using random-digit-dialing (RDD) methods, and data are collected using computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI). The NHES sample is drawn from the civilian population in households having a telephone in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. In each NHES survey year, between 45,000 and 64,000 households are screened, and individuals within each household who meet predetermined criteria are sampled for more detailed or extended interviews on one or more of that year’s topics.

Use of telephone-based interviewing provides NHES with quick access to respondents. The turnaround for NHES data collection and reporting is estimated to be less than a year. Yet telephone interviewing is not without problems. The largest component of potential coverage bias in telephone surveys is probably due to nontelephone households (approximately 6 percent of households do not have a telephone). The NHES design does, however, incorporate steps to minimize such potential biases and to limit their possible effect on survey estimates. In future data collections, NHES will need to address innovatively the growing ubiquity of cell phones, as well as solve current problems with respondent burnout caused by commercial solicitations over the telephone. The flexibility and usefulness of the NHES design should enable it to continue to meet such challenges.