Cor935 10/24/06 HPENS and HRETIR - Pensions and Retirement Attitudes Modules For more information on the Pensions Module see Appendix Q. OVERVIEW The graduate spouse pension questions mirror those asked of the graduates. The section begins with the types of retirement plans that the spouses own, then follows by asking whether any benefits are being received from these plans. If they were not, eligibility age and expected benefit level are collected. (If the spouses were currently receiving benefits, this information was collected in the income module.) A retirement attitudes section follows. All respondents were asked if they considered themselves completely, partly, or not at all retired. For those who had retired, the month and year of retirement were ascertained. Respondents who had not retired were asked when they planned on retiring and whether their spouse would retire at that time. Fifty percent of the respondents (conditioned on the RETFLAG) were asked about their current or expected post-retirement living standards, and about their post-retirement relationship with their spouse. 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 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 AT001RE-AT006RE Type of pension plans AT007RE-AT011RE Current and expected benefits AT012RE-AT021RE Retirement experience / outlook on retirement 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 Pensions 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.