Using the Survey of Consumer Finances: Methodological Considerations and Issues

Abstract

We identify and present original analyses of four methodological issues related to using Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) datasets 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 SCF and federal standards, using the Repeated-Imputation Inference method to combine the five implicates in each survey year's dataset, and discussing the use of weighted or unweighted data in multivariate analysis. We found 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 SCF more carefully.