Cor975
								06/11/07			
			
			SASSETS - Assets Module
			
For more information on the Sibling Assets Module, see Appendix L.

OVERVIEW

The 1994 assets section contained questions about savings, investments, and debts. Constructed variables included those for home, real estate, business/farm, vehicle equity, and a measure of net worth. A flag indicated whether some reports were missing.  

Across each section, in 2005, assets expanded substantially. The inclusion of life insurance items, however, was the largest change to this module along with several additions to savings and investments. 

More detailed information on primary residence (mobile homes and retirement communities) was in this round of assets along with previous residential information. The savings and investment section expanded to four separate categories: checking/savings/money market funds, CDs/government savings bonds/treasury bills, stocks/bonds/mutual funds, and other assets. This section also addressed account balances for retirement plans like 401Ks and IRAs. 

Life insurance policy questions including face/cash value questions proceeded questions about other assets. In the nonnormative parenting sample respondents were asked more details about life insurance beneficiaries than other respondents. Questions pertaining to who knows the most about assets, debts, and retirement plans, end this section.

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. 


BRIEF VARIABLE OVERVIEW

CR020RP-CR037RP		Real estate and vehicles - value and outstanding loans
CR060RP-CR069RP		Financial assets - retirement savings, bank accounts, 
                        investments, etc.
CR080RE-CR085SP		Respondent’s and spouse’s life insurance
CR100RPC-CR101RPC	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. Details regarding the problems with individual cases which occurred during the interviewing process are in the *private* subcor877a.
   

PEOPLE

    Kamil Sicinski, Wes Taylor - Coding of Sibling 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.