Known Facts or Reasonable Assumptions? An Examination of Alternative Sources of Housing Data

Researchers can choose from a wide variety of data sources to measure the dynamics of production, consumption, and change in America’s housing stock. Yet there have been few systematic comparisons of housing and household characteristics across data sets. Such considerations typically appear when differences in survey sampling, database content, or question wording are invoked to explain unexpected or inconsistent results. We describe key differences of nine data sets commonly used in housing research and provide an empirical analysis of differences among the American Housing Survey, the Consumer Expenditure Survey, the National Survey of Families and Households, and the Survey of Income and Program Participation. The analysis compares selected financial and demographic characteristics by household tenure. Although demographic characteristics such as age of householder and household size generally are comparable across data sets, there are considerable and statistically significant differences for important financial characteristics.

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