In response to the creation of a new question series regarding high school educational attainment, called the Current Population Survey’s (CPS) High School Validation Study, staff from the Center for Survey Methods Research (CSMR) in the Statistical Research Division (SRD) cognitively pretested these questions for the U. S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) and the Demographic Surveys Division (DSD). In addition to these external and internal sponsors for this research, the Population Division (POP) also helped to guide the pretesting agenda.

Collaboration between the NCES and the American Institutes for Research (AIR) resulted in the CPS High School Validation Study questionnaire, to be embedded (as follow-on questions) into the CPS’s 2006 education supplement. The universe for these questions includes residents of the sampled address between the ages of 18 and 24. The NCES initiated the validation study in an effort to better understand reporting behavior for “regular” high school diplomas and General Education Diplomas (GED) collected by core and supplemental CPS questions.