The Future of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (1993) / Chapter Skim
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1 INTRODUCTION
1 INTRODUCTION
Pages 13-25
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From page 13... ...
over the next 2-1/2 years, the interviewers returned to each household in the 1984 SIPP panel to obtain updated information. The survey did not stop with one panel: beginning in February 1985 and each year thereafter, Census Bureau interviewers queried a new sample of households, revisiting each of them at 4month intervals over a period of about 2-1/2 years.
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From page 14... ...
Within this broad framework, the following specific goals of SIPP and some of the design features that resulted from those goals were identified: · to improve the reporting of family and personal income, both cash and in-kind, by source by asking more questions and by obtaining reports more frequently than once a year; · to obtain detailed information, comparable to administrative data, on program participants, including multiprogram participants, and on the dynamics of participation over time by asking for monthly information at each interview, with more detailed questions and relevant explanatory variables, and by following the same people to observe program entries and exits; · to obtain information necessary to determine program eligibility, including data on assets, and to characterize participants in comparison with eligible nonparticipants; · to provide an opportunity to obtain timely information on emerging concerns of social welfare policy, broadly defined-by including special sections of questions (topical modules) on subjects of current policy interest (e.g., disability, child support, day care, health status, and use of health care)
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From page 15... ...
A rescue effort mounted by the newly appointed director of the Census Bureau and other staff in the executive branch and Congress persuaded the administration and Congress in the summer of 1982 to restore full funding for SIPP in the budget of the Census Bureau. (The original plan had been to have the survey sponsored by the Social Security Administration and conducted by the Census Bureau, with costs divided between them.)
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From page 16... ...
Part-Year Poverty and Program Participation Federal and state assistance programs such as AFDC and food stamps are designed to help people who experience short periods of hardship, as well as those in need for longer periods. SIPP provides information that was previously unavailable on part-year periods of low income and on the proportion of program recipients who rely on benefits for temporary assistance in comparison with the proportion who depend on them over the longer term.
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From page 17... ...
Multiple Program Participation The number and scope of federal and state assistance programs have grown enormously since the 1960s. The annual data from the March CPS income supplement can only show how many people receive benefits from more than one program at some time during the year.
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From page 18... ...
SIPP provides data that can inform policy makers about the extent to which loss of health insurance coverage is a short-term or long-term phenomenon and whether proposed public policies, such as mandated employer health insurance benefits, are effectively targeted at the problem. Using data from the 1984 SIPP panel for adults aged 18 and over, Swartz and McBride (l990:Table 1)
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From page 19... ...
, who examined the interrelationship of leaving home and other characteristics in the 1984 SIPP panel: they found that young women were more likely to leave their parents' home than young men, that young men who had left were more likely to return, and that the parents' income had a negative association and the young person's employment, income, and education had a positive association with nest leaving; · Koo and Gogan (1988) , who documented the extensive amount of change experienced by households in their membership over a 9-month period, using data from the 1979 research panel of the Income Survey Development Program (the predecessor to SIPP)
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From page 20... ...
SIPP has one of the most extensive programs for data quality research and improvement of any federal survey. On many dimensions of data quality, SIPP has registered signal improvements over the March CPS income supplement.3 However, weaknesses many of which SIPP shares with other surveys remain, including: incomplete coverage of the population, particularly young minority men; high nonresponse rates for some types of income and assets; timing errors in reporting receipt of benefits from programs, along with errors due to confusion among program names; and loss of sample cases (i.e., attrition or dropping out from a panel after the first interview)
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From page 21... ...
4Most analyses conducted to date have used the original 1984 SIPP panel, both because it was the only panel available for a period of time and because of its large sample size (the largest of any panel until 1990)
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From page 22... ...
cliff~lt nrnblems of data collection, particularly to obtain SSee Bianchi (1990) for a review of changing patterns of family composition and other socioeconomic trends that involve children, many of which have implications for survey data collection.
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From page 23... ...
The use of modern database management systems can support an integrated approach to data processing that makes it easier to link data for families and individuals across interview waves and to improve data quality (e.g., by using all available information from prior waves to supply values for missing data)
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From page 24... ...
These changes include lengthening each SIPP panel; keeping open the option of further extending panel length to obtain additional observations for population subgroups of policy interest; and improving the retrospective information that is collected on respondents' previous program participation and family background. Next, in Chapter 5 we consider operational alternatives for SIPP data collection and processing, including the use of computer-assisted interviewing and database management systems.
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From page 25... ...
Moreover, the many changes that are proposed as part of the upcoming redesign of SIPP-including changes in content, survey and sample design, data collection and processing, and data products- will place especially heavy burdens on management over the next few years. We propose ways to strengthen the management of SIPP that we believe are vitally important to the smooth implementation of the redesign and, more broadly, to the successful operation of the Census Bureau's income statistics program in future years.
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