Abstract:
Household income is difficult to measure, since it requires collecting information about all potential income sources for each member of a household. We assess the effects of two types of edit check questions on measurement error and survey estimates: within-wave edit checks use responses to questions earlier in the same interview to query apparent inconsistencies in responses; dependent interviewing uses responses from prior interviews to query apparent inconsistencies over time. The findings suggest that traditional interviewing methods under-estimate household income in the lower tail of the income distribution, but that neither edit check method has much effect on estimated poverty rates or transition rates in poverty.
