Introduction to the Survey of Income and Program Participation

This workshop is the first of two sessions that will provide an introduction to the SIPP, a nationally representative survey administered by the U.S. Census Bureau. The second workshop will take place at 4 PM on Thursday, April 8th.  The SIPP provides continuous data on family and individual-level income, demographics, and social program participation from the late 1980s to present in a series of 3-4 year longitudinal panels. This session will discuss issues related to accessing the public use files, dataset structure, availability of key variables, and basic issues in data analysis (such as constructing individual identifiers, seam bias between survey waves, and sample attrition). The session will go on to review some recent evidence on data quality, and highlight concerns about underreporting of social program participation. Finally, the session will introduce the SIPP Synthetic Beta (SSB), a new Census Bureau data product meant to give researchers public access to a dataset matching SIPP demographic data with long-term labor market earnings and some program participation, while protecting the privacy of SIPP respondents.


This workshop is being organized by the National Poverty Center with funding support from the U.S. Census Bureau, Housing and Household Economics Statistics Division.