Landmark Reporting in the 2010 Survey of Income and Program Participation Event History Calendar

Brianne Hillmer, U.S. Census Bureau
Lindsay M. Monte, U.S. Census Bureau

The Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) is undergoing redesign to incorporate an Event History Calendar (EHC), reducing cost and respondent burden through a change to annual data collection. Based on the conceptual design of paper event history calendars and the PSID’s initial decision to include landmarks in their CAPI instrument, the calendar portion of the SIPP-EHC interview also begins with a topic to collect landmark events (Belli, 1998). This topic is designed to orient the respondent and interviewer in the reference time frame and identify anchors from the respondent’s own autobiographical story. These anchors are used in the ensuing dialog between interviewer and respondent as memory cues applied to the recall of primary topics and the timing of transitions during the reference period. This research describes the landmarks reported in the 2010 SIPP-EHC data collection, and evaluates their association with characteristics and measures of data quality.