Cor977
									06/13/07
			SOINC - Income Module    

For more information on the Income Module see Appendix L.


OVERVIEW

In 1994 the income section was intended to obtain reports on every source of income and amounts received during the respondent’s last 12 months for all members of the respondent’s household, (the exception being question about child support and alimony paid by anyone in the household.)  The section began by focusing on earnings and self-employment income of the respondent (and spouse) and then asked about other sources of income for anyone in the household.  Household members for this purpose included anyone currently living with the respondent as well as students who lived with the respondent while school was in session.  The incomes of students who lived in the household only during the summer between sessions were not included, nor were the incomes of other persons who lived in the household during the past twelve months but who are not currently living there.

In the 2005 wave, this section covered information on respondents and spouses own income from the following sources: wages/salaries, business/farm, social security, pensions, SSI/public assistance, and other government programs. Also covered in this section were joint income from interests/dividends and income from any other sources.  If any other people were present in the household, we asked them for a single figure for all of their income from all sources. The section concluded with two questions on economic sufficiency.

Methodologies we used in 2005 to collect income data differ from those in 1994.
Wage/salary income and business/farm income were pre-bracketed in 2005; we asked respondents first if they (or their spouse) received more than $500, then asked a follow up question to specify that amount. This technique, known as pre-bracketing (or implicit bracketing), is useful in reducing the number of cases where $0 is reported as a polite refusal. Additionally, Social Security was queried independently of other programs while SSI was lumped with other government programs. This was appropriate because most respondents were eligible for Social Security by 2005. In addition to this, respondents were not specifically asked about child support or alimony income; this was reported as "other income." There were very few people with these types of income in 1994, and we expected even fewer in 2005.  Finally, we asked all other household members in a single question for all types of income.  In 1994 we cycled through every householder, and collected income from every source.

Created constructs in 2005 included total personal income (for the respondent and his/her spouse) and total household income .  

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. 

A NOTE ON DIFFERENCES WITH GRADUATE RESPONDENT 2004 VARIABLES

The Gradute CATI instrument only asked about the year in which Social Security or pension benefit receipt begun.  In a substantial number of cases, that year coincided with the year of interview, making it impossible to precisely calculate how much income was obtained from these sources over a period of 12 months.  To correct this problem, in the sibling interview additional questions about the month of receipt were added for such cases.  

BRIEF VARIABLE DESCRIPTIONS

   CP201RE-CP213SP	Respndent’s and spouse’s income from regular sources 
   			(wages, Social Security, etc)
   CP214RP-CP223RP	Income from other sources (dividends, lottery, 	
   			inheritances)
   CP224HH-CP225HH	Income of other household members
   CP226RE-CP227RE	Economic sufficiency
   CP250REC-CP261HEC	Total 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. Details regarding the problems with individual cases which occurred during the interviewing process can be found in the *private* Subcor889a. 

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.