The Use of Differential Methods and their TSE Impacts on the 2022 National Household Travel Survey

The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) of the U.S. Department of Transportation periodically conducts the National Household Travel Survey (NHTS), which is considered to be the authoritative source on the travel behavior of the American public. It is the only source of national data that enables the analysis of trends in personal and household travel. It includes daily non-commercial travel by all modes, including characteristics of the people traveling, their household, and their vehicle(s). For the NHTS that was conducted in 2022, FHWA used two different survey sampling, recruitment, data collection, and weighting designs: (1) an address-based sample (ABS) design and (2) a panel frame sample (PFS) design. For 2022, the data collected via the ABS design are the “official” data for this survey, while the data collected via the PFS design were gathered and evaluated to determine if the PFS design could eventually replace the ABS design in future instances of the NHTS. To support that effort, FHWA contracted for an independent assessment of the comparability of these two survey designs in terms of their sampling and recruitment methodologies, data quality, and weighting. This manuscript presents information that details the independent assessment that was conducted. The evaluation was guided by the Total Survey Error framework. Among the hundreds of comparisons made between the corresponding findings of the 2022 ABS and PFS surveys, very few meaningfully statistically significant differences in core attributes were found. These differences primarily pertained to demographic attributes, not to travel-related attributes.