SIPP collects information on respondents that receive Social Security income on behalf of a child. Variables capturing this information include ESSCANY, ESSCMNYN, and ESSCAMT. The 2019 SIPP also includes three variables that can be used to link adults receiving this income with the child beneficiary:

• ESSKDCOVFLG, which is equal to 1 on the record of child beneficiaries, flagging those children covered by Social Security.
• ESSCADLTPTR, which is on the record of child beneficiaries. This variable holds the PNUM of the adult receiving Social Security income on behalf of the child, and can be used to link children to adults.
• ESSKIDCTR, which is on the adult’s record. This variable counts the number of children that the adult receives Social Security income on behalf of.

The SIPP survey instrument collects these data at the person level, but the variables are edited to include person-month variation due to changes in household composition. Because of this, the Social Security parent-child linkage variables do not reflect variation in monthly receipt.

For a few respondents, there are discrepancies between the monthly receipt indicators on the adult’s record and the monthly coverage flags on the child’s record. There are also a small number of instances where reported receipt does not align with the child’s birth or age. Users that would like to exclude these months of receipt from their analysis can after linking the adults to children by setting ESSCMNYN=2 where ESSKDCOVFLG is not equal to 1 and the child’s age is greater than 17.

Please contact the Program Participation and Income Transfers Branch at (301) 763-6685 if you need additional guidance.