Assessment of the Quality of State SNAP Administrative Data

This study was conducted for the Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) in collaboration with USDA’s Economic Research Service (ERS) and the Census Bureau. It addresses one of the four research priorities identified by an expert panel convened for FNS to identify and prioritize research needs related to using linked SNAP administrative and Census Bureau survey data to improve SNAP eligibility estimates. The report provides an inventory of State administrative data files held by the Census Bureau when the study was in progress, describes the process we used to standardize the data files and the variables on the standardized files, and presents tabulations of the administrative data to assess their quality.