Editorial Standards

Sourcing

All data published on americandefault.org comes from federal statistical agencies or direct-from-source press releases. Specifically: the Federal Reserve Economic Data system (FRED), the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Census Bureau, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Federal Reserve Board, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the U.S. Courts. For indicators where federal APIs do not provide the underlying data — ATTOM foreclosure filings, ABI/Epiq bankruptcy volumes, Challenger layoff counts, MBA 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, baseline periods, normalization approach, and composite weights.

Named byline

Ross Kilburn is the founder of American Default Research and the named author for all editorial analysis. Anonymous bylines are not used. Where content is generated programmatically — template-based county narratives, auto-generated statistics prose, headline variants — the page discloses the generation method, and the scripts and prompts that produced it are documented in the project's public repository.

Corrections

Factual corrections are made in place on the affected page, with a note at the bottom of that page stating what changed and when. The full revision history of any page can be recovered through the project's public git repository — the commit log is the audit trail. Errors, disputed claims, or requests for correction can be reported to press@americandefault.org.

Independence

No advertising. No sponsored content. No paid placements. No affiliate revenue from the content itself. The disclosed business model is real estate referral: Ross Kilburn is a licensed Washington State real estate agent, and readers who reach certain distress-related housing outcomes through the site's help tools may be referred to a brokerage. This relationship is disclosed on any page where a referral pathway is solicited, and is never applied to editorial decisions about which data to publish or how to frame it.

No political endorsements. No partisan framing. American Default Research publishes data about household financial distress. It does not advocate for candidates, parties, or specific legislation. Where policy context is relevant to a metric, it is stated factually and sourced.

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.