Metadata record for Survey of Consumer Finances, 1948 Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research ICPSR metadata records are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License . 2013-05-19 Survey of Consumer Finances, 1948 3601 10.3886/ICPSR03601.v1 Economic Behavior Program. Survey Research Center. University of Michigan Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research 1984-05-11 Survey of Consumer Finances Series Economic Behavior Program, Survey Research Center, University of Michigan. SURVEY OF CONSUMER FINANCES, 1948. ICPSR version. Ann Arbor, MI: Institute for Social Research, Social Science Archive [producer], 1973. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2002. doi:10.3886/ICPSR03601.v1 automobile ownership business conditions consumer attitudes consumer behavior consumer expectations consumer expenditures debt disposable income durable goods economic conditions families financial assets financial balances home ownership household budgets household expenditures household income housing income distribution investments mortgages national economy occupations personal debt personal finances post-World War II period prices savings NACDA.III ICPSR.IV.A This data collection is one in a series of financial surveys of consumers conducted annually since 1946. In a nationally representative sample, the head of each spending unit (usually the husband, the main earner, or the owner of the home) was interviewed. The basic unit of reference in the study was the spending unit, but some family data are also available. The questions in the 1948 survey covered the respondent's attitudes toward national economic conditions and price activity, as well as the respondent's own financial situation. Other questions examined the spending unit head's occupation, and the nature and amount of the spending unit's income, debts, liquid assets, changes in liquid assets, savings, and actual and expected purchases of cars and other major durables. In addition, questions were asked about housing and home ownership. The subject of emphasis in this survey was the respondent's means of saving, with questions on investment preference, amount of present holdings in postal savings, credit unions, and savings accounts, whether respondent had a regular plan for savings, and attitudes regarding saving versus spending or investing. The 1948 survey included a separate questionnaire for farmers that contained differing questions on sources of income. Personal data include number of people in the spending unit, age, sex, and education of the head, and the race and sex of the respondent. 1948 1948-01 1948-03 United States The population of the United States. survey data The respondents interviewed were drawn from a national sample of dwelling units. The dwelling units falling in the sample were chosen by area probability sampling to represent the United States population. personal interviews

ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection:

Standardized missing values.Performed recodes and/or calculated derived variables. (1) Most of the data in the study pertain to a spending unit. For some variables, information from related spending units was combined to provide data on a family basis. The user should refer to the instructions and worksheets included with the codebook to ascertain the procedures followed in these computations. (2) The majority of the variables in the study represent information obtained through direct questioning of the respondent. Some variables, however, are the result of computations done for each interview, e.g., amount saved, total indebtedness, estimated income taxes, and the relation of these amounts to income. (3) In some instances, where important information was missing, assigned values were given. The assigned values were based on other known characteristics of the spending unit and occur only in a small proportion of the cases. Those variables containing assigned information are preceded by a lead variable, indicating for each case whether the value in the following variable is assigned or not. (4) The codebook is provided by ICPSR as a Portable Document Format (PDF) file. The PDF file format was developed by Adobe Systems Incorporated and can be accessed using PDF reader software, such as the Adobe Acrobat Reader. Information on how to obtain a copy of the Acrobat Reader is provided on the ICPSR Web site. Ann Arbor, Mi.: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research Additional special permissions, where applicable, are described in the restrictions field.

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