The editing of SSA 2014 marital history information differs from that of previous SIPP Marital History Topical Modules. Whenever marital history information was not reported by a respondent in SSA 2014, if valid information from SIPP 2014 Wave 1 was available (e.g., year of first marriage, year of current marriage, number of times married, or marital status) this was used to fill in the missing variable. When values are provided by SIPP 2014 Wave 1, the allocation flag is set to 7, indicating a combination of self-reporting, imputing, assigning values logically, using a cold deck and imputing from a range. This information was not available in earlier panels of SIPP.

Additionally, due to the circumstances under which the SSA 2014 interviews were conducted (phone interviews only 6 months after SIPP 2014 Wave 1) the non-response rates were quite high across and within households. Among many married couples, only one spouse was fully interviewed, so the other spouse’s marital information was allocated (1,339 allocated spouses).

Because of the availability of SIPP 2014 Wave 1 information during the SSA 2014 editing process and the high non-response of spouses, allocation rates in the SSA 2014 for the marital history variables are not comparable to those of previous SIPP Marital History Topical Modules. Therefore, comparisons of allocations between previous SIPP waves and SSA 2014 are discouraged.