Aug 22 -- The U.S. Census Bureau invites comments to OMB by September 22, 2022 on the 2023 Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) as revised from 2022.
The SIPP collects information about a variety of topics including demographics, household composition, education, nativity and citizenship, health insurance coverage, Medicaid, Medicare, employment and earnings, unemployment insurance, assets, child support, disability, housing subsidies, migration, Old-Age Survivors and Disability Insurance (OASDI), poverty, and participation in various government programs like Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Supplemental Security Income (SSI), and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF).
The SIPP sample is nationally representative, with an oversample of low-income areas, in order to increase the ability to measure participation in government programs.
The SIPP program provides critical information necessary to understand patterns and relationships in income and program participation. It will fulfill its objectives to keep respondent burden and costs low, maintain high data quality and timeliness, and use a refined and vetted instrument and processing system. The SIPP data collection instrument maintains the improved data collection experience for respondents and interviewers and focuses on improvements in data quality and better topic integration.
Starting in 2019, the Census Bureau and the Social Security Administration (SSA) entered into a joint agreement where both agencies support the SIPP program by contributing resources to add, process, review, and maintain additional content on marital history, parental mortality, retirement and pension, and disability. This joint agreement started in September 2019 and goes until September 30, 2023.
The SIPP instrument is currently written in Blaise and C#. It incorporates an Event History Calendar (EHC) design to help ensure that the SIPP will collect intra-year dynamics of income, program participation, and other activities with at least the same data quality as earlier panels. The EHC is intended to help respondents recall information in a more natural “autobiographical” manner by using life events as triggers to recall other economic events. For example, a residence change may often occur contemporaneously with a change in employment. The entire process of compiling the calendar focuses, by its nature, on consistency and sequential order of events, and attempts to correct for otherwise missing data.
Since the SIPP EHC collects information using this “autobiographical” manner for the prior year, due to the coronavirus pandemic, select questions were modified to include answer options related to the pandemic as well as adding new questions pertaining to the pandemic. For instance, we adjusted the question regarding being away from work part-time to include being possibly furloughed due to coronavirus pandemic business closures. We also added new questions to collect information on whether the respondent received any stimulus payments.
In the 2023 SIPP, proposed revisions include removing questions on the Expanded Child Tax Credit, COVID-19 related Economic Impact Payments, and COVID-19 related school meals.
The SIPP respondent universe is the civilian, noninstitutionalized, which contains approximately 327.7 million individuals at the time of sampling for the 2023 SIPP. The SIPP uses a two-stage stratified sample of this universe. The first stage involves grouping counties within each state into Primary Selection Units (PSUs), which are assembled into homogeneous groups called strata. One or two PSUs are then selected from each stratum. The second stage involves selection of units within the selected PSUs.
SIPP:
https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/sipp.html
Submission to OMB:
https://www.reginfo.gov/public/do/PRAViewICR?ref_nbr=202208-0607-003 Click on IC List for collection instruments, View Supporting Statement for technical documentation. Submit comments through this site.
FR notice inviting public comment:
https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2022-18059
For AEA members wishing to submit comments, "A Primer on How to Respond to Calls for Comment on Federal Data Collections" is available at
https://www.aeaweb.org/content/file?id=5806