Reengineering the Survey of Income and Program Participation (2009) / Chapter Skim
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2 SIPP's History, Strengths, and Weaknesses
2 SIPP's History, Strengths, and Weaknesses
Pages 17-36
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From page 17... ...
Yet, overall, the survey has shown a marked resilience and has earned the support of users who find the SIPP data indispensable for important kinds of policy analysis and research. Principalsources of information for this chapter include National Research Council (1993)
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From page 18... ...
Finally, a 1979 ISDP research panel followed members of about 9,500 original sample households over 6 interviews every 3 months, for a total of 18 months. The interviews asked about monthly employment, income, and program participation; asset income was ascertained once every 6 months.
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From page 19... ...
People in institutional settings and homeless people were not part of the sample, nor were people who moved outside the United States. Children under age 15 and adults who moved in with an original sample member after the first interview wave were included in the data collection so long as they resided with the original sample member. The SIPP design called for sample members to be interviewed every 4 months in order to increase the accuracy of answers to core questions on income amounts, participation in social programs, employment status, and health insurance coverage on a month-by-month basis compared with interviews at longer time intervals.
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From page 20... ...
• Medical Expenses and Work Disability (once in 1987-1992 panels; 2-4 times in 1993, 1996, 2001, 2004 panels) • Work Disability History (once early in every panel beginning in 1986)
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From page 21... ...
Program participation modules • Real Estate Property and Vehicles (once or twice in most panels -- for deter mining program eligibility) • Real Estate, Shelter Costs, Dependent Care, and Vehicles (once or twice in selected panels -- for determining program eligibility)
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From page 22... ...
New SIPP panels began every February from 1985 through 1993. These panels were designed to overlap in time, so that samples from two different panels could be combined to provide representative cross-sectional estimates for a given year of the poverty rate and other characteristics, whereas a single panel would provide longitudinal information on intrayear transitions in employment, poverty status, and other characteristics for a sample of people followed over 2-3 years.
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From page 23... ...
in sample sizes due to changes in household composition because original sample people moved out of or back into an original sample household. Sample loss rates consist of cumulative noninterview rates adjusted for unobserved growth in the noninterviewed units (created by household splits after Wave 1)
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From page 24... ...
To maximize sample size for longitudinal analysis with a single panel and so reduce the need to combine panels for analysis purposes, as well as to reduce the burden on the field interviewers, the practice of introducing a new panel every year was dropped. The CNSTAT panel had recommended introducing new panels every 2 years and continuing them for 4 years, so that two panels would be in the field at any one time.
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From page 25... ...
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO, 2003) analyzed data on health insurance coverage from the SIPP 1996 panel, the 1998 and 1999 Medical recent estimate puts the number of publications based on SIPP at over 2,000 books, A articles, reports, and other written products issued through 2006 (see http://www.census.
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From page 26... ...
The SPD core instrument asked about employment, income, program participation, health insurance and utilization, child wellbeing, marital relationships, and parents' depression. SPD topical modules included a self-administered adolescent questionnaire asked in 1998 and 2001, additional child-related questions asked in 1999 and 2002, and residential histories of children asked in 2000.
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From page 27... ...
The monthly CPS is used to calculate monthly unemploy ment statistics, and the need to keep producing those statistics would prevent the Census Bureau from making major changes in the survey on its own initiative. Similarly, various economic surveys produce data used in computing the National Income and Product Accounts, the source of data on the gross domestic product.
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From page 28... ...
One thought was that an existing survey, such as the CPS, might provide baseline data for a sample cohort: current and retrospective income and program data would be obtained from administrative records, and additional information would be obtained from follow-up interviews at annual intervals. The original charge to our panel was to evaluate the plans to use administrative records for this new program.
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From page 29... ...
to 21,300 original sample households for the last four waves of the panel; it also eliminated the topical modules for these waves. This reduction allowed the agency to reduce SIPP spending of about $44 million annually to $25.4 million and to use part of the savings to continue disseminating data to users from earlier waves of the 2004 panel.
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From page 30... ...
STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES OF SIPP DATA Ideally, a reengineered SIPP would preserve or even enhance the survey's strengths while ameliorating many of its weaknesses. SIPP's principal strengths include • its unique and extensive monthly data on employment, earnings, program participation, and household composition; • the information collected on assets, shelter costs, medical expenses, and other items in its periodic topical modules that is necessary to simulate program eligibility and take-up rates; • the detailed information collected on an array of subject areas related to socioeconomic well-being in its periodic topical modules; and • the overall quality of the information collected on program par ticipants and the low-income population generally relative to other household surveys.
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From page 31... ...
SIPP is also unique in its ability to support models of short-term dynamics over a wide range of characteristics, including models of earnings dynamics based on its monthly data on employers and wages. The household component of the continuous M EPS -- see http://www.meps.ahrq.gov/mepsweb/ -- also collects data on short-term dynamics of employment and health insurance coverage, in 5 interviews over a 2.5-year period for each panel, providing 2 calendar years of data.
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From page 32... ...
. Data Quality Shortcomings With the monthly data collected in SIPP, users can estimate transitions involving a wide range of phenomena, including labor force activity, program participation, health insurance coverage, and family composition.
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From page 33... ...
SIPP's rotation group structure distributes interviews uniformly by calendar month, so changes in such characteristics as program participation, employment, and health insurance coverage should occur with the same frequency between any consecutive pair of reference months within or between survey waves. Instead, such transitions are more likely to be reported between month 4 of one wave and month 1 of the next wave than between any pair of months within the same wave.
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From page 34... ...
Another study using the same sources of administrative records found that there were negligible differences between the stayers -- reweighted to represent the Wave 1 universe -- and the full, initial sample on annual earnings reported to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) , Social Security income and type of recipiency, and benefit amounts from the Supplemental Security Income (SSI)
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From page 35... ...
Other Bias Concerns Although SIPP is a panel survey, cross-sectional uses may be more common than longitudinal analyses of SIPP data. Evidence that cross-sectional estimates of poverty show trends that deviate from trends recorded in the CPS suggests a panel bias that should caution users against reliance on cross-sectional estimates from later waves (Czajka, Mabli, and Cody, 2008)
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From page 36... ...
dynamics of economic well-being for families and households, including employment, earnings, other income, and program eligibility and participation. Recommendation 2-2: The Census Bureau's reengineering program for the Survey of Income and Program Participation should explicitly evaluate each proposed innovative feature, such as the use of administrative records or an event history calendar, on the extent to which a feature contributes to the survey's ability to measure short-term changes in economic well-being with improved quality and timeliness.
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Key Terms
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