Assessing data from summary questions about earnings and income
利用英国纵向调查的验证数据，评估了简短总结性问题收集的收入数据质量，发现其噪声较大且存在系统性低报，但测量误差与真实值基本不相关，表明总结性问题在特定情境下仍是有用的数据收集工具。
In short surveys, or in surveys that prioritise other content domains, earnings and income are often elicited using small sets of summary questions. This contrasts with the detailed questions recommended for surveys that focus on earnings and income, that ask source by source. We evaluate earnings and income data collected with summary questions in a series of recent web-surveys: the Understanding Society COVID-19 Study. The fact that many COVID-19 Study respondents also contemporaneously answered the main annual Understanding Society survey provides individual- and household-level validation data. We find that measures of household earnings and income in the COVID-19 Study are noisier than those from the main annual Understanding Society survey, and that there is evidence of systematic under-reporting for household totals. However, for most measures and samples, we find that measurement errors in the COVID-19 Study are substantively uncorrelated with true values. We conclude that the COVID-19 Study collected valuable data on earnings and income, and more broadly, that summary questions on earnings or income can be a useful data collection tool.