National Beneficiary Survey-General Waves Round 7 (Volume 3 of 3): User’s Guide for Restricted Access and Public Use Files

Sponsored by the Social Security Administration’s (SSA’s) Office of Retirement and Disability Policy, the National Beneficiary Survey-General Waves (NBS-General Waves), collects data on the employment-related activities of working-age beneficiaries of Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI). In 2019, Mathematica conducted the seventh round of data collection since the NBS began in 2004.

This report provides users with information about the restricted-use and public use data files, including construction of the files; weight specification and variance estimation; masking procedures employed in the creation of the Public Use File; and a detailed overview of the questionnaire design, sampling, and NBS–General Waves data collection. The report provides information covered in the Editing, Coding, Imputation and Weighting Report and the Cleaning and Identification of Data Problems Report (described below) —including, procedures for data editing, coding of open-ended responses, and variable construction—as well as a description of the imputation and weighting procedures and development of standard errors for the survey. In addition, this report contains an appendix addressing total survey error and the NBS.