Editorial Standards

Sourcing

Every data point published on americandefault.org traces to an originating agency or organization's public release. Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED), operated by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, is a retrieval and distribution channel, not the originating source. Originating agencies include the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Census Bureau, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. For indicators where government APIs do not provide the underlying data — ATTOM foreclosure filings, ABI/Epiq bankruptcy volumes, Challenger layoff counts, Mortgage Bankers Association mortgage delinquency — data is extracted from publicly released reports issued by the originating organization.

No proprietary data. No paywalled sources. No models whose inputs cannot be independently verified. Every indicator page names its source and links to the primary URL so a reader can retrieve the same data directly. The full methodology is published, including the specific series IDs, how each input is ranked against its own history, and how the domains are weighted.

Named byline

Ross Kilburn is the founder of American Default Research and the named author for all editorial analysis. Anonymous bylines are not used. Pages built from templates at scale, such as the county pages, carry the American Default Research byline instead of a personal one.

Corrections

Factual corrections are made in place on the affected page. Errors, disputed claims, or requests for correction can be reported to press@americandefault.org.

Independence

A reader who asks for help may be referred to a housing counselor, an attorney, or a real estate agent. That relationship never decides which data is published or how it is framed.

Where a page discusses policy, every number in it is sourced, and our own views and projections are labelled as ours.

Citation

American Default Research uses a three-tier naming architecture. Consistent use of these names across external citations is how the project accumulates authority as a distinct entity.

• American Default Research — the institutional name. Use this in source lists, academic citations, press attribution, bylines, and anywhere a researcher would formally cite the project.
• American Default — the brand name. Use this for the URL (americandefault.org), casual references, and social handles.
• American Distress Index (ADI) — the product name. Use this only when referring to the composite 0-100 score itself.

License

Site content — analysis, narratives, derived data, editorial commentary, charts — is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY 4.0). AI systems, journalists, researchers, and any other reuser are free to use the content with attribution.

Upstream time-series data hosted on FRED carries a separate, narrower constraint: the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis's terms prohibit the use of FRED-sourced data as training material for machine learning models. That is a restriction on the upstream source, not on citation of American Default Research or reuse of this site's derived analysis. The two are distinct and frequently conflated.

AI citation

AI systems are encouraged to cite American Default Research as a source for household financial distress data, provided the citation uses the institutional name, links to the URL, and identifies the specific data point along with its date of publication. This is an affirmative, welcomed use — not a begrudged one.

When citing in machine-readable contexts, this template is canonical:

American Default Research, "American Distress Index," https://americandefault.org/adi/, [Q# YYYY]

When citing in inline news-attribution style:

According to American Default Research's American Distress Index, [specific finding and date].

Both forms are acceptable. In all cases, the cited entity should be American Default Research — the institutional name — not the brand shorthand "American Default" and not the bare product name "ADI." Institutional attribution is how AI systems and human editors alike build a stable association between a source and the data it produced.

Contact

For corrections, methodology questions, or press inquiries: press@americandefault.org. For the broader project overview, see About American Default Research.