מסמך טכני מיומן המחקר · באנגלית, כפי שנכתב בשלב העבודה
V91 follow-up: PSID 2021–2023 timing feasibility audit
29 October 2026. Documentation audit only; no participant records acquired, sample counted, outcome estimated, calibration changed or website deployed.
Decision
The inspected PSID food measures do not implement the v91 monthly -3:-1 / +1:+3 outcome. Keep that primary-design gate CLOSED. A between-interview spending association is a possible separate study, not an implementation or validation of the monthly design.
Verified field anchors (partial crosswalk)
Sources are the official family codebooks linked below. Page numbers are printed PDF pages.
| Purpose | 2021 | 2023 | Scope |
|---|---|---|---|
| Family interview ID | ER78002 | ER82002 | Wave-specific; not a person linkage key |
| Interview month/day/year | ER78012/13/14 | ER82012/13/14 | Actual dates, not wave labels |
| Checking/savings/money-market amount | ER79970 (p660) | ER83940 (p647) | Current balance |
| Food-at-home amount / period, SNAP branch | ER78868/69 (p320) | ER82861/62 (p313) | Usual-week question; multiple reported units |
| Food-at-home non-SNAP branch | Not mapped | ER82871/72 (p313 note) | Branches must be reconciled |
| Main-job end month, reference person | Not mapped | ER82167 (p54) | Year and other jobs still needed |
| Main-job separation reason, reference person | Not mapped | ER82234 (p81) | Broad categories |
| Main-job separation reason, partner | Not mapped | ER82553 (p202) | Separate work history |
| Family longitudinal weight | Not mapped | ER85812 (p1357) | Variance design still unresolved |
| Total expenditure | ER81914 (p1414) | Not mapped | Constructed basket, not monthly diary |
2021 release 3 corrects annualized water expenditure and affected totals. Pin that release. Negative account balances are valid; zero amount may require routing information. Food unknown/refused codes are not zero. Branch-specific receipt, delivery, eating-out and imputation fields remain unmapped.
Temporal-order implications and decisions
These are analysis decisions arising from the documentation, not provider-certified feasibility findings.
- Do not use an endpoint current balance as a pre-event resource measure. A baseline balance is eligible for temporal ordering only when its actual measurement date precedes the earliest possible separation date. A job-end month overlapping baseline interview month cannot establish within-month order without additional information.
- A 2021-to-2023 comparison could support only a between-interview usual-spending estimand, conditional on completing the crosswalk. It cannot recover missing monthly observations by dividing annualized expenses by twelve. Nor does a monthly employment history create monthly expenditure observations.
- Baseline balances can be remote from the event. Any redesigned historical specification must define and justify permitted lags before inspecting outcomes; never choose a lag to improve significance.
- Usual-week spending has an incompletely dated reference window. Ordering an interview after an event is insufficient to certify that all spending refers to the post-event period.
- Do not automatically label a broad company-change category a plant closure or involuntary displacement. Audit original reason codes, job slots, employment status and temporary-layoff handling before defining exposure.
- A constructed total-expenditure denominator is not automatically mean spending over the three baseline months required by v91. Inspect component reference periods, benefits treatment and annualization before proposing a different buffer ratio. Standalone cash is not established by the mapped account variable.
- Family interview identifiers must be linked through the official cross-year individual file, including index-person identity changes, splitoffs and partner continuity. A household is not certified stable because a family label matches.
- A longitudinal weight alone does not establish survey variance validity. Audit design variables, genealogy/clustering and guidance for the chosen domain before any precision claim.
Gate record
| Gate | Result |
|---|---|
| Primary dated monthly pre/post food outcome | Not supported by inspected measures; closed |
| Liquid assets provably before event | Conditional; record-level dates and routing untested |
| Exact involuntary-event classification | Incomplete |
| Complete food basket including benefit-funded purchases | Incomplete |
| Monthly baseline total-expenditure denominator | Not established |
| Cross-wave index-person/household linkage | Not audited |
| Design-based variance and achieved precision | Not audited |
| New empirical association or macro calibration | Not authorized by this evidence |
This crosswalk is intentionally partial; it is not an extraction specification. No raw-value decoder is supplied because branching and missingness must first be completed. No participant data are published.
Access and next research priority
The official PSID data page states that first-time downloads require registration. Public documentation was accessible; no authenticated download or registration was attempted.
Next priority: screen CE official documentation for exact separation timing/reason, dated expenditures and a strictly pre-event resource reference date. Continue without acquiring outcomes. If CE also fails the monthly-design gates, retain the prospective monthly design and prepare its practical recruitment/data-access feasibility assessment. A historical PSID association remains a separately specified alternative, not the confirmatory fallback selected by favorable results.
Provenance and validation
- 2021 family codebook, release 3 described on p2: https://psidonline.isr.umich.edu/documents/psid/codebook/FAM2021ER_codebook.pdf
- 2023 family codebook, release 1: https://psidonline.isr.umich.edu/documents/psid/codebook/FAM2023ER_codebook.pdf
- Provider download/access guidance: https://simba.isr.umich.edu/data/data.aspx
- Parent design: DIRECT_CONSUMPTION_DESIGN_V91.md
Each mapped identifier was checked against the indicated official entry. This is a live-document audit, not a checksum-pinned local extraction; retain exact source files and hashes before implementation. No new software was changed, so the existing calculator's three passing tests do not validate PSID measurement or linkage.