Table 1 summarises the income response for sweeps one and two by type of
respondent: original sample, new families and proxy respondents. Both the „new
family’ respondents and the proxy respondents have higher rates of non-response
among the eligible sample than the original sample (Tables 1(b) and 1(c)). The lower
response with the proxy is to be expected as the main respondent is less likely to
know the partner’s actual earnings than the partner themselves. We shall focus on
the responses from the original sample for the rest of the paper.
Table 2 shows the relationship between main and partner respondents’ responses to
the income questions at each sweep for the original sample. The first panel contains
the within family income response for MCS1. We can see that if the main respondent
responds to the income question then the partner is also most likely to respond to
their income question (78.5%). If the main respondent does not respond to the
income question then 26.6% of partners also do not respond. A similar pattern of
results is found for MCS2.
Table 1: Pattern of Income Non-Response, MCS sweeps 1 and 2
(a) Original Sample
|
Swee |
p One |
Swee |
p Two | |
|
Main |
Partner |
Main |
Partner | |
|
income response |
45.9% |
64.7% |
50.6% |
62.9% |
|
don’t know/refusal |
2.7% |
4.3% |
4.4% |
8.7% |
|
not applicable |
51.5% |
31.0% |
45.1% |
28.4% |
|
sample |
__________18552__________ |
__________14898__________ | ||
(b) Sweep Two including New Families
|
New Families Only |
All Families (New & | |||
|
Main |
Partner |
Main |
Partner | |
|
income response |
27.9% |
42.4% |
49.5% |
61.9% |
|
don’t know/refusal |
5.7% |
11.5% |
4.4% |
8.9% |
|
not applicable |
66.4% |
46.2% |
46.1% |
29.3% |
|
Sample |
____________692____________ |
___________15590___________ | ||
(c) Proxy
|
Sweep One |
Sweep Two | |
|
income response |
32.9% |
59.3% |
|
don’t know/refusal |
22.0% |
39.6% |
|
not applicable |
45.1% |
1.1% |
|
sample |
___________338___________ |
___________226___________ |
NOTES:
1. weighted percentages, unweighted observations
The second panel contains the within family income response for sweep two of the
MCS. Similar patterns to panel one can be seen. However, we can see that there
are generally larger proportions of respondents in each cell who don’t know or refuse
to respond to the income questions.