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1 As a result of a reduction in funding in 2004, ACS dropped the telephone and personal visit followup operations for the January 2004 panel, thus only allowing mail respondents to contribute to the overall response for that panel. Dropping the nonresponse followup operations for that single panel month reduced the annual response rate by about four percentage points. If we exclude the January panel from the calculation, the annual response rate rises to 97.3% The Census Bureau revised the methodology for calculation of the response rate in 2004 and although a similar cost reduction measure was taken in 2002 the response rates provided for 2002 do not reflect this new method.
