American Life Panel (ALP) (ICPSR 39382)

Summary View help for Summary

The RAND American Life Panel (ALP) is a nationally representative panel of 11,000 members ages 18 and older who speak English or Spanish. The ALP has expanded from about 800 members in 2003 to its current size. ALP surveys are conducted online to provide quick, affordable, and high-quality results. To enhance the representativeness of the panel, RAND provides internet services and computers to members that would otherwise not be able to participate. ALP members are primarily recruited through probability-based methods. Once in the ALP, participants tend to remain indefinitely, resulting in relatively low attrition rates. ALP panel members are responsive, with survey completion rates generally in the 70%-80% range. All respondent data collected with the American Life Panel are accompanied by demographic information about each respondent. This set of demographics is collected three times a year through a household information survey. The content collected from the household information survey is patterned after the Current Population Survey (CPS) to aid in weighting the data. Files from different studies can be merged using a unique identifier for each panel member. The ALP has conducted more than 450 surveys covering diverse topics, such as financial decision-making, the effect of political events on self-reported well-being, inflation expectations, joint retirement decisions, retirement preferences, health decision-making, Social Security knowledge and expectations, measurement of health utility, and numeracy. All public data are available for free to researchers. Restricted data for the ALP is available to approved researchers at a cost.

Geographic Coverage View help for Geographic Coverage