13-MAY-2004
1994 PSID Main Family Data
1994 DATE OF INTERVIEW CORRECTION FILE
For the 1994 wave of data collection, the PSID used electronic interviewing
for the second time. Due to system crashes, a number of interviews were conducted
using paper and pencil and were entered by coding staff into the interviewing
application, and hence the Survey Research Center sample management systems logged
the entry date as the interview completion date.
PSID staff failed to notice this for some time, and when the error was discovered,
mounting an effort to identify and locate the paper materials and to hand code the dates
was not practicable with staff resources then available, although we fully intended to
correct the data.
However, the date on which the interview actually occurred is very important for some
users, and a timely request by Dr. Joseph Altonji at Yale University and Dr. Nicolas
Williams at the University of Cincinnati combined with a staffing window of opportunity
precipitated our completion of this project.
This file contains corrections for the month-day combination variable (ER2005) for date
of interview for the PSID 1994 Family data. The dates are in error for 1,971 of the
10,764 families; this file contains only those cases requiring corrections.
The 1994 Date of Interview Correction file consists of one data file with 1,971 cases
and two variables, and each record has a length of 9. In addition to the data
file above and this document, we also include SAS, SPSS and STATA data definition
statements.
The data in the .zip package are in raw ASCII form, and the file is named
IWDATE94.DAT. Refer to the corresponding .SAS, .SPS or .DO file for record format
layout information.
Two variables are present on the file: ER2002, "1994 INTERVIEW #" and ER2005,
"DATE OF INTERVIEW". The contents correspond to variables with the same names
in the 1994 Family codebook. To use the corrections, match to the family file using
the family identifier, ER2002.
The corrections file is not available through the PSID Web Site Data Center; the
main family file will be corrected when the full 1994 data are re-released.
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