The SIPP is a longitudinal survey conducted over a period of 3 to 5 years. The survey’s mission is to provide a nationally representative sample for evaluating: 1) annual and sub-annual income dynamics; 2) movements into and out of government transfer programs; 3) family and social context of individuals and households; and 4) interactions among these items.

Beginning in 2014, the SIPP was redesigned to modernize the instrument and provide data that addresses it mission goals more efficiently. During this redesign, the SIPP incorporated questions from many of the topical modules into the base set of questions asked during each wave and topical modules were no longer used for data collection.

In the 2014 panel of the SIPP, disability is collected using the six disability questions from the ACS as well as three additional question related to child disability, and three additional questions related to work disability.

The questions used to measure disability in the 2014 SIPP are below:

Prior to 2014, each interview or “wave” of a panel contained supplemental questionnaires or “topical modules (TM)” that touched on different topics. Prior to 2014, three topical modules cover disability specifically:

• Work Disability History TM (2008 Panel, wave 2)
• Adult Functional Limitations TM (2008 Panel, wave 6)
• Child Functional Limitations TM (2008 Panel, wave 6)

The Adult and Child Functional Limitations TMs serve as the data source for the Americans With Disabilities P70 report series. The SIPP disability questions cover:

• Limitations in functional activities - seeing, hearing, speaking, walking, using stairs, grasping, lifting and carrying
• Activities of daily living (ADLs) – difficulty getting around inside the home, getting in/out of a bed/chair, bathing, dressing, eating, and toileting
• Instrumental activities of daily living (IADLs) – difficulty going out, managing money, preparing meals, doing housework, taking prescriptions, and using the phone
• Use of assistive aids such as wheelchairs, crutches, canes, or walkers
• Presence of conditions related to mental functioning
• Difficulty working at a job or business
• Disability status of children including developmental disabilities, learning disabilities, and difficulty with schoolwork.

While the disability measure covers a broader spectrum of activities, a drawback to the SIPP as a data source is the relatively small sample size.

In the 2008 SIPP, the six disability questions used in the ACS were added to the Medical Expenses and Utilization of Health Care TM (waves 4/7/10). While a less comprehensive measure of disability, these questions capture core concepts of disability.

In addition to disability specific information, the Informal Caregiving TM (2008 Panel, wave 9) collects information about those who care for family members or friends with ADL and IADL limitations.

Figure 1: from the Americans with Disabilities: 2010 report report describes the definition of severe and nonsevere disability. For a full description of the programming code/logic, see recoding SIPP disability variables.

With the SIPP redesign in 2014, the topical modules were removed. In order to retain the data collected in the adult and child functional limitations modules, as well as the work disability history module, a telephone survey was requested by the Social Security Administration (SSA) to collect the data. This supplement, called the SSA Supplement, was fielded between September and November of 2014 and used all respondents from wave 1 of the 2014 SIPP as the sample. As such, data from the 2014 SSA Supplement can be merged with data from the 2014 SIPP panel for analysis if desired.

In the 2008 SIPP, wave 6 Adult and Child Functional Limitations topical modules, there are two recode variables – RDISAB and RKDISAB, respectively – that indicate the overall disability status used in the Americans with Disabilities Report. The code shown in the recode document replicates the logic used to generate these variables using the individual disability types collected in the SIPP.