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.

Phone: Assets

SASSETS - Assets Module

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 2004, 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.  Upper bound of infinity is denoted
by a special missing code - ".i" in Stata, "I" in SAS and system missing in
ASCII datasets.

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

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

Note: See Cor 975 in Appendix L for variable creation details

Imputed data for a subset of variables in this module are available in 
"Ancillary Data: Economic Imputations"