WLS Codebooks

Note: Codebooks contain frequency data from the private data release. For some variables, these differ from the frequencies in the public release. Variables that differ between the public and private versions include "(not available on public release)" as part of the variable description, or a note indicating the difference between the public and private versions.

In Person: Income and Pensions

JINCPENS - Income and Pensions Module  

OVERVIEW

Several changes were made to the income section relative to the 2004 wave of
interviews.  As the respondents are increasingly out of the labor force,
emphasis was placed on identifying sources of retirement income.  Information
on annuities was collected for the first time. Unlike in 2004, separate series
of questions were asked about defined benefit plans (traditional pension) and
defined contribution plans.  To help streamline the interview, asset values of
retirement plans were collected alongside income.  Thus, the distinction
between the asset and income modules in 2010 is not as clear cut as in previous
waves of the WLS.  Finally, a 50% random subsample of respondents was asked
questions about the impact of the financial crisis of 2008 on the value of
their retirement savings.

The section opens with Social Security, followed by detailed questions on
traditional pensions and defined contribution plans held by the respondent and
his/her spouse or partner.  Information on five largest annuities is gathered
next.  The remainder of the module covers wages and salaries, self-employment
income, disability income and income from other sources.  The section closes
with two questions on economic sufficiency.

Unfolding brackets followed questions asking for dollar amounts in this
section. Associated with these items are four variables (identified by the last
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.  Upper bound of infinity is denoted by a special
missing code - ".i" in Stata, "I" in SAS and system missing in ASCII datasets.

Unfortunately, due to instrument error, some of the bracketing questions in
this section were wrongly asked on PER YEAR basis. For example, the question
read "Would it amount to less than $25,000 or more than $25,000 PER YEAR?"
instead of "Would it amount to less than $25,000 or more than $25,000?" The
bracketing outcomes for the affected items were mixed, largely depending on the
interviewer's handling of the problem.  In some cases the interviewers caught
the mistake and did not read the PER YEAR part. In others respondents became
confused by the PER YEAR framing, yielding unusable data.  The WLS staff
listened to the affected interviews and wiped out or corrected the bracketing
information when necessary.

Data for the 2011 collection wave were primarily compiled from in-person (CAPI)
and - more rarely - telephone (CATI) interviews, as well as from
self-administered questionnaires that participants were asked to complete and
mail back after being interviewed. Sometimes participants who were unwilling to
be interviewed in-person or by telephone indicated they would be willing to
return a self-administered questionnaire (SAQ). Thus we created a special
version of the SAQ and mailed it to participants who did not complete an
in-person or telephone interview: the "mail-only self-administered
questionnaire" (MOSAQ). In addition to replicating all content in the original
2011 SAQ, the MOSAQ also contained questions analogous to those asked in
selected CAPI modules: Marriage, Cohab, and Dating; Children; Health;
Employment; Income and Pensions; and Assets. Since MOSAQ data contributed to
THIS module, users should pay special attention to analysis variable values of
-29 and -30. Values of -29 (left blank on MOSAQ) mean that the information
contained within a CAPI variable was asked of but not answered by a MOSAQ
participant while values of -30 (not part of MOSAQ) mean that comparable
information was not asked of MOSAQ cases.

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

    HINCSTAT-HINCREL:  		Module-level status variables

    HP205RE-HP208SPC:           Social Security 
    
    HP289RE-HP510SPE:		Traditional Pensions 
    
    HP530RE-HP543SPC:		Defined Contribution Plans
    
    HP400RP-HP411RP5:		Annuities
    
    HP201RE-HP204SPE:           Wages and Business Income
    
    HP550RE-HP555RE:		Disability Benefits
    
    HP212RE-HP213SPE:		Government Programs
    
    HP216RP-HP223RPE:		Other Income
    
    HP3* series:		Impact of Financial Crisis of 2008
    
    HP224HH-HP225HH:            Income of Other Household Members

    HP226RE-HP227RE:            Economic Sufficiency

    HPU50REC-HP261HEC:          Total Income