Spending patterns of public-assisted families

Monthly Labor Review

Volumn 123, Issue 5, 2000, Pages 29-35

  Tan, Lucilla ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0039301641     PISSN: 00981818     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (6)

1. Data presented in this study are for complete income reporting consumer units interviewed from January through December 1998. Due to the 3-month reference period of the quarterly Interview component of the Consumer Expenditure Survey, the data for this article include data for October 1997 through November 1998; this effectively constitutes 12 months of data due to the rotating sample design of the survey. Complete income reporters are respondents who have provided values for major sources of income, such as wages and salaries, self-employment income, and Social Security income. Even complete income reporters may not have provided a full accounting of all income from all sources. In the current survey, across-the-board zero income reporting was designated as invalid, and the consumer unit was categorized as an incomplete reporter. A consumer unit includes: 1) members of a household related by blood, marriage, adoption or other legal arrangement; 2) a person living alone or sharing a household with others but who is responsible for at least two of the following three major types of expenses - food, housing, and other expenses; or 3) two or more persons living together who pool their income to make joint expenditure decisions.
2. For this article, a family refers to the term, consumer unit, which is the unit of analysis in the Consumer Expenditure Survey.
3. Supplemental security income refers to assistance payments to low-income aged, blind or disabled persons; the requirements vary by State. Welfare assistance includes payments under various assistance programs, such as emergency assistance, general assistance, and Cuban Refugee Assistance. The Consumer Expenditure Survey asks for the total value expended on food; the survey does not distinguish if any part of that food expenditure was paid for with food stamps.
4. In comparison, data from the 1993 panel of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), which covers the period October 1992 to December 1995, showed that in each month of 1994, about 15.2 percent of the U.S. civilian population, on average, participated in one or more of the following assistance programs: Aid to families with dependent children (AFDC), general assistance (GA), food stamps, Supplemental security income (SSI), medicaid, and housing assistance. See Dynamics of Economic Well-Being: Program Participation, Who Gets Assistance?, Current Population Reports, P70-69 (U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Household Economic Studies, August 1999).
5. A reference person is the first member mentioned by the respondent when asked to "start with the name of the person or one of the persons who owns or rents the home." It is with respect to this person that the relationship of the other consumer unit members is determined.
6. The annual mean expenditure per family member group of an expense category is calculated as the annual mean expenditure for the expense category (See table 4.) divided by the average family size. (See table 2.)