Cor933
								10/24/06			
			
			HASSETS - Assets Module
			

For more information on the Assets Module see Appendix L. 


OVERVIEW

A full range of asset categories was asked of graduate spouses only in the case when the graduate respondent indicated that the spouse is more knowlegable about finances (GR086RE).  On top of that, a random 10 percent sample of spouses was asked the value of their home.  
Compared to the graduate interview, fewer asset questions were asked of spouses.  The value of vehicles, debts and life insurance policies was not collected.  Also, many of the graduate asset categories were collapsed into a single question.  However, this was done in such a way that it is possible to recreate these variables from the graduate data.   

As in the graduate interview, unfolding brackets followed questions asking for dollar amounts in this section. Associated with these items are four variables (identified by the eight characters of the variable name) detailing the collected information in the bracketing sequence.  The character "b" is associated with a summary variable, "u" and "l" denote the upper and lower bounds and "e" indicates the entry point into the bracketing sequence.

During the interview, interviewers had a chance to leave notes with additional information obtained from the respondents.  The WLS staff reviewed and processed these notes using a standardized set of decision rules for each section.In many cases processing the notes resulted in changes to the coded responses which created inconsistencies in the skip pattern of the CASES instrument. While we put considerable effort into adjusting such discrepancies, we could not eliminate them all. Occasionally, notes indicated problematic cases due to the lack of specific information or, conversely, cases that contained extra information that was important enough to retain. In such instances we created a flag, identified by the character "f" and attached it to the variable name, for the affected variable. 


BREIF VARIABLE OVERVIEW

AR001RP-AR004RPC	Home ownership and value (10 percent random sample)
AR005RP-AR016RPC        Real estate ownership and value 
AR017RP-GR021RP		Financial assets: retirement savings, bank accounts, 
                        investments, etc.
AR025RPC		Net worth 

PROBLEMS

   Problems occurred in the coding of the Cases instrument and during the interviewing process. Problems with the instrument that affected codes for analysis variables are included as notes with the affected variables in the codebook.  Most notably, the question on financial knowlege (AR023RP) was erronously skipped in the instrument unless the preceeding item contained a "Don't know" or "Refused".


PEOPLE

    Liz Rainwater, Kamil Sicinski, Wes Taylor - Coding of Asset module for Cases instrument.
    
    Kamil Sicinski- Checking of notes, making corrections, coding/supervising coding of open-ended responses, and writing the COR.
    
    Kamil Sicinski - Writing code to create analysis variables, making corrections to raw data, and writing the COR.