No national data nor state-level data are available. The records are comma-delimited with fixed column positions. The 22 Public Use Data files are organized by subject matter. In some instances, a FBSS user may want to undertake analysis that requires using a variable from several different files. In those cases, the files have to be linked to one another.
Imputation is a statistical procedure used to fill in values for missing items.
The imputation flag indicates whether the corresponding non-Z variable was reported, imputed, missing, or inapplicable. The FBSS was designed so that survey responses could be used to estimate characteristics of the entire Federal commercial stock in each region selected. To arrive at the regional estimate from the FBSS sample, base sampling weights for each building, which were the reciprocal of the probability of that building being selected into the sample, were calculated. Therefore, a building with a base weight of 1,000 represents itself and 999 similar, but unsampled buildings in the total building stock for a region. The base weight is further adjusted to account for nonresponse bias.