1998 Supplemental Imputed Family Income/Personal Earnings Files

Since the 1997 NHIS, income dollar amount ranges have been provided on the NHIS public-use data files. However, survey data may be more useful for policy analysis when income dollar amounts (instead of income ranges) are available in public-use data files. To increase the usability of NHIS income data, NHIS staff created a set of supplemental imputed family income and personal earnings files which contain income dollar amounts. Because respondent confidentiality must be balanced against providing more detailed information, the variables containing the dollar amounts for personal earnings and family income have been top-coded to the 95th percentile of the appropriate distribution. The 95th percentile was calculated separately for each of the 5 imputed family income/personal earnings datasets and then a weighted average of the 5 individual 95th percentile amounts was calculated. The weighted average was rounded to the nearest $1,000 and this weighted average was used to top-code all 5 supplemental imputed personal earnings and family income datasets. The same procedure was used for family income and personal earnings dollar amounts. For all observations which were top-coded, the family income or personal earnings dollar amounts were replaced with the top-coded value. Also, since the 1997 NHIS, poverty ratio ranges have been provided on the NHIS public-use data files. The poverty ratio is a ratio of the family’s income to the appropriate Federal poverty threshold. In the supplemental imputed family income and personal earnings files, the poverty ratio is calculated using top-coded family income and the final calculated poverty ratio value is rounded to 2 decimal places.

Five ASCII data sets containing the supplemental top-coded values for the 1998 survey year are included in the compressed data file (INCIMPS.EXE), which can be downloaded via the Datasets link below. For analyses involving other previously released variables in addition to family income or personal earnings, each set of values from the supplemental imputed family income and personal earnings files can be merged with other data from the 1998 NHIS to create a single completed data set. The imputed values on the supplemental imputed family income and personal earnings files were imputed using multiple imputation, a technique that allows analysts to incorporate the extra variability due to imputation into their analyses. For more information about the correct analysis of multiple imputed data, please refer to the 1998 Imputed Family Income/Personal Earnings Files.

The Dataset Documentation link below opens to a document containing both the file layout description and the frequency counts (in the last page) of selected variables (survey year, imputation number, top-coding flags) for the 1998 survey year. A sample SAS program which can be used to create SAS datasets for each of the 5 supplemental imputed family income and personal earnings data files is available from the Sample SAS Input Program link below. Users are also encouraged to check the NHIS website for updates and to subscribe to the NHIS Listserv to receive notices of any corrections/updates.