Population Association of America – Pre-Meeting Workshop on the Redesign of the Survey of Income and Program Participation

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Workshop on the Redesign of the Survey of Income and Program Participation

Wednesday, April 29, 2015, 1.00pm to 4.30pm

Sponsored by the Committee on Population Statistics,

the Triangle Census Research Network, and the Census Bureau

OVERALL OBJECTIVES:

1. Provide introduction, background, and context of the SIPP’s current and past designs for new and current SIPP researchers.

2. Provide an overview of SIPP’s content, file structure, and data availability.

3. Demonstrate some of the possible ways to access and use SIPP data.

4. Provide an opportunity to increase stakeholder involvement and interaction with the SIPP program staff.

WORKSHOP STRUCTURE:

1. Overview of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (approximately 30 min.)

  • Survey staff will provide an overview of the SIPP — its history, recent reengineering, and a report of progress to date for the 2014 panel. This section of the demonstration is primarily geared towards researchers unfamiliar with (or trepidatious about) SIPP.

2. Design and Content Discussion (approximately 40 min.)

  • The survey team is developing extensive metadata for SIPP, including crosswalks between SIPP (2014 and later panels) and SIPP Classic (2008 and previous panels). These crosswalks are provided at the topic level and at the item level. They go both forward from 2008 to 2014 and backward from 2014 to 2008. Presenters will provide an overview of the data from its collection as spells in the Event History Calendar to its final person-month format in the public-use dataset. In addition, innovations in production of imputations will be discussed that incorporate modeling and administrative records data to improve intra-person and intra-household coherence. This section concludes with a presentation of the current status and expected release schedule for the redesigned Wave 1 public use data files.

3. SIPP Data Access

  • Data Access and Resource Overview (approximately 10 min.)
    There are many ways to access SIPP data. We will give a brief introduction to changes in the presentation and access to SIPP data via the SIPP website, FTP, DataFerrett, and other tools and data products.
  • Orlin System Demonstration (approximately 40 min.)
    Orlin has developed a user-friendly data and analysis tool to assist users of SIPP data. This tool allows researchers to recode variables, combine different waves of a SIPP panel, run analyses, et cetera. This section of the workshop includes a demonstration of the system by its developers.
  • SIPP Synthetic Beta Demonstration (approximately 40 min.)
    The SIPP Synthetic Beta (SSB) file integrates person-level micro-data from the SIPP with administrative tax and benefit data. The purpose of the SSB is to provide access to linked data that are usually not publically available due to confidentiality concerns. To overcome these concerns, Census Bureau has synthesized, or modeled, all variables in a way that changes the record of each individual in a manner designed to preserve the underlying covariate relationships among the variables. We will describe the SSB file and demonstrate its uses, as well as a tutorial on how to obtain access to the file.
  • RDC Projects and Collaboration Opportunities (approximately 15 min.)
    For researchers whose projects require access to restricted, non-public data, the Census Bureau maintains a network of Research Data Centers (RDCs) at universities across the country. Access to the RDCs is granted via application for projects that provide a clear benefit to the Census Bureau and its mission. This section of the workshop provides an overview of the RDC system and the application process for access.