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The quality of social security benefit data in the British Family Resources Survey: implications for investigating income support take‐up by pensioners
Author(s) -
Hancock Ruth,
Barker Geraldine
Publication year - 2005
Publication title -
journal of the royal statistical society: series a (statistics in society)
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.103
H-Index - 84
eISSN - 1467-985X
pISSN - 0964-1998
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-985x.2004.00336.x
Subject(s) - survey data collection , logistic regression , generosity , data quality , social security , scale (ratio) , quality (philosophy) , econometrics , demographic economics , actuarial science , economics , statistics , geography , mathematics , political science , operations management , market economy , metric (unit) , philosophy , cartography , epistemology , law
Summary. Family Resources Survey (FRS) data for April 1997 to March 2000 are used to estimate the take‐up of income support (IS) by a subset of pensioners. We scrutinize the quality of FRS data for this purpose and describe a process of identifying and correcting inconsistencies in the data. Comparisons are made, before and after corrections to the data, of take‐up estimates, logistic regression take‐up models and predictions of take‐up responses to changes in IS rates. Overall, the corrections do not have large effects on estimated take‐up rates but suggest that non‐take‐up is marginally less serious than the uncorrected data imply. Logistic regressions using corrected and uncorrected data were in broad agreement on the factors influencing take‐up. There were some differences in the scale of these influences, with implications for predictions of take‐up responses to changes in the generosity of IS. Desirable improvements in the FRS are identified.