The Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance program (OASDI), popularly known as Social Security, serves a number of distinct subpopulations. The program analogue for these subpopulations is type of benefit. Analysis of the social and economic characteristics of different beneficiary subgroups using household survey data can contribute significantly to accurate portrayal of program outcomes and to planning program initiatives. However, previous research has shown that reliable discrimination among different types of benefits is not possible in the typical general household survey. Consequently, research requiring distinctions among benefit types has required that survey data be matched to SSA program records. Such matches are time consuming, difficult to implement, and subject to stringent confidentiality restrictions. This article reports on the development and evaluation of a procedure that identifies major benefit categories in the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) data set that relies solely on data collected from respondents at interview. The ability to identify type of benefit enhances the SIPP as an important new source of information for policy-related research on the Social Security program.

The Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (OASDI) program, popularly known as Social Security, provides income support for retired and disabled workers and their dependents and for survivors of deceased workers. Because the data that the Social Security Administration (SSA) maintains on its own beneficiaries is limited to what is directly required to administer the OASDI program, and for the most part is restricted to current and past beneficiaries, the agency has long been involved in the development and use of household surveys to obtain a fuller picture of the social and economic characteristics of its beneficiaries and the populations from which they are drawn. For this reason, the Survey of Income and Program participation (SIPP), administered by the Bureau of the Census, represents a source of information that is of considerable interest to SSA.