We identify and present original analyses of four methodological issues related to using Survey of Consumer Finances data sets and illustrate these issues with recent articles published in this journal. The issues are recognizing that the respondent is not necessarily the household head, reporting race and ethnicity in conformity with Survey of Consumer Finances and federal standards, using the repeated‐imputation inference method to combine the five implicates in each survey year’s data set, and discussing the use of weighted or unweighted data in multivariate analysis. We found a considerable variation in how authors dealt with these issues, which could hinder replication or comparison of research results. Authors and reviewers should consider methodological issues related to the Survey of Consumer Finances more carefully.
The Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) is the most frequently used dataset for research in this journal, but many researchers and readers do not fully understand some of the dataset’s complex details. This article provides insight into important issues that researchers and readers need to understand to accurately conduct and interpret SCF-based research. The issues addressed include the primary economic unit versus the household, identifying the respondent versus the head, limitations of variables in the survey, imputation and implicates, shadow variables, the public dataset versus the full dataset, weighting of analyses, and the use of replicate weights.
We identify and present original analyses of four methodological issues related to using Survey of Consumer Finances data sets and illustrate these issues with recent articles published in this journal. The issues are recognizing that the respondent is not necessarily the household head, reporting race and ethnicity in conformity with Survey of Consumer Finances and federal standards, using the repeated-imputation inference method to combine the five implicates in each survey year's data set, and discussing the use of weighted or unweighted data in multivariate analysis. We found a considerable variation in how authors dealt with these issues, which could hinder replication or comparison of research results. Authors and reviewers should consider methodological issues related to the Survey of Consumer Finances more carefully.
Conventional advice is to reduce risky investments as one ages. Such a generalized focus on risk avoidance may be inappropriate for elderly with longer life spans and those with financial goals that extend beyond their lifetime. To better understand risky asset holdings among the elderly, we investigated the effect of cognitive ability and bequest motive on stock ownership and stock purchase. Using the 2004 wave of the Health and Retirement Study, we found that one-third of elderly households held stocks and 36% of those elderly stockowners had recently acquired stocks. The respondent's cognitive ability and bequest motive were strongly related to stock ownership. Among those who owned stock, a bequest motive was positively related to a recent purchase of stocks.
Most research studying family financial behavior of racial/ethnic groups has ignored Asian households or arbitrarily combined them with other racial/ethnic groups. We treated Asian households as a separate racial/ ethnic group to compare twelve financial behaviors and attitudes of Asian households to those of three other racial/ ethnic groups: White, Black and Hispanic. Using multivariate analyses with the 2010 Survey of Consumer Finances, we found differences in seven behaviors/attitudes between Asian households and each of the other three household types, although the differences were not consistent across groups except for a lower credit delinquency rate of Asian households. Our results suggest that Asian households should be analyzed as a separate group and should not be combined with other racial/ethnic groups for comparison purposes.
Which spouse is more knowledgeable about the household's finances in mixed‐sex married couple households? The answer to this question can be inferred from the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), which assigns the title of “respondent” to the person the household indicates is more knowledgeable about its finances. In the 2016 SCF, the husband was the respondent in 56% of husband‐wife households, but among households in the top 1% of net worth, the husband was the respondent in 90% of the households. Despite the progress women have made in education and other aspects of society, husbands were the respondent in a higher percent of households in 2016 than in 1992, and the husband was much more likely to be the respondent in wealthy households. Logistic regression on whether the husband or wife was the respondent showed a strong effect of the spouse with more education being the respondent.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.