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Bureau of Labor Statistics > Office of Survey Methods Research > Publications > Browse Research Papers

Examining the Relationship between Household Income and Response Rates in the Consumer Expenditure Survey

Lauren Vermeer

Abstract

Income is an important analysis variable in household surveys. In 2013, BLS found a variable on a publicly available dataset from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), which gave the average adjusted gross income (AGI) in most US zip codes. This zip-code level AGI variable was found to be correlated with the Consumer Expenditure Survey’s (CE) response rates. The variable was introduced into CE’s nonresponse adjustment procedure, the first to be added from outside the survey’s sampling frame. It is important to periodically check and confirm variables’ functionality in survey procedures, so the variable was reexamined in 2023. This paper describes both the reexamination process and the results, which show that the relationship between income and households’ response rates is less stable than previously determined