1Income for year preceding the survey.

Source: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System,Federal Reserve Bulletin, January 2000 and unpublished data.

http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/oss/oss2/scfindex.html

*The Survey of Consumer Finances

The Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) is a triennialsurvey sponsored by the Federal Reserve with the cooperationof the Department of the Treasury. It is designed toprovide detailed information on U.S. families balancesheets and their use of financial services, as well as on theirpension rights, labor force participation, and demographiccharacteristics at the time of the interview. The survey alsocollects information on total family income, before taxes,for the calendar year preceding the survey. The term familyas it is used here is more comparable to the U.S. Bureauof the Census definition of household than to Censussuse of family, which excludes single people.

The underlying statistical methodology of the surveyshas been largely unchanged since 1989, and the questionnaireshave been modified only slightly, mostly to reflectchanges in the availability of financial services or in thefinancial behavior of families. Thus, the data since that timeare comparable.

The need to measure financial characteristics imposesspecial requirements on the survey design. The survey mustprovide reliable information both on items that are broadlydistributed in the populationfor example, vehicleownershipand on items that are highly concentrated in arelatively small part of the population for example, investmentreal estate. To address this problem, the SCF employsa dual-frame sample design that includes a standard geo-graphicallybased random sample and a special oversampleof relatively wealthy families. Weights are used to combineinformation from the two samples for estimates of statisticsfor the full population.

The SCFs for 1992 and 1995 were conducted by the National OpinionResearch Center at the University of Chicago (NORC)between July and December of each survey year. For the1992 survey, 3,906 families were interviewed, and for the1995 survey, 4,299 were interviewed.

All dollar figures are adjusted to 1998 dollarsusing the consumer price index (CPI) for all urbanconsumers. Concerns about how accurately the CPI repre-sentsinflation for families have been discussed in theliterature. If, as generally supposed, the index overstatesthe true degree of inflation, upward adjustments to pastdollar amounts will appear too large, and trends in positivedollar amounts will be biased downward. An index sometimesproposed as an alternative to the CPI is the implicitprice deflator for personal consumption expenditure (PCE),which is reported as a part of the national income andproduct accounts. Over 1989-98, price changes measuredby the CPI and the PCE deflator differed by a relativelysmall amount.

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