Case Prioritization in the SIPP: A Five-Year Review

Case prioritization is a concerted effort to achieve high data quality during data collection by reallocating scarce resources to the sample cases that need them the most. Our research, conducted as part of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), examines the effect of case prioritization over the changing landscape of this survey. Our findings suggest that since instituting case prioritization, field interviewers exert more effort on higher priority cases, and continual centralized monitoring and intervention have led to improvements in data quality measures, in particular R-indicator and coefficient of variation (CV) of response propensities.