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: Income

SOINC - Income Module    

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.  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. 

A NOTE ON DIFFERENCES WITH GRADUATE RESPONDENT 2004 VARIABLES

The Graduate 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:      Respondent'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


Note: See Cor 977 in Appendix L for variable creation details

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