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As part of its ongoing quality control program the Field Division of the Census Bureau conducts reinterviews monthly with small samples of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) respondents. The purpose of this reinterview program is to evaluate individual interviewer performance to determine if retraining or dismissal is necessary. In addition to ascertaining whether the interview was actually conducted with the correct unit and whether the proper procedures were employed, the reinterview contains a small set of questions of substantive content. While it was never the intent of the reinterview program designers, the existence of the reinterview data makes estimation and analysis of nonsampling error in the SIPP possible. Such analysis is potentially important because it is quite apparent that data from the SIPP are far from perfect.
The purpose of the present research is assess this potential by merging the reinterview data with public release data and analyzing the combined data. The paper is organized in three sections. In Section 1 the SIPP reinterview program is described in some detail. Section 2 presents a question-by-question description of response, procedural and overall interview/reinterview discrepancies. Finally, in Section 3, two classes of multivariate models are developed and estimated.
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