Cor924
									10/24/06
			HOINC - Income Module    

For more information on the Income Module see Appendix L.


OVERVIEW

Graduate spouses were asked to provide information on their own income from the following sources: wages/salaries, business/farm, social security, pensions, SSI/public assistance/other government programs. If the graduate indicated that the spouse is more knowlegable about finances (GR086RE,) the spouse was also asked about interest/dividend income.  Unlike in the graduate interview, questions about other income were not asked.

As in the graduate inteview, 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 information collected 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. 

BRIEF VARIABLE DESCRIPTIONS

   AP201RE-AP213RE	Graduate spouse’s income from regular sources 
   			(wages, Social Security, etc)
   AP214RP-AP215RP	Household income from interes and dividends
   			inheritances)
   
   AP250REC-AP251HEC	Total personal income

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. 

PEOPLE

   Liz Rainwater, Kamil Sicinski, Wes Taylor - Coding of Income 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.