University of Cape Town CENTRE FOR SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH PANEL ATTRITION IN SURVEY DATA: A LITERATURE REVIEW Una Lee CSSR Working Paper No. 41 Published by the Centre for Social Science Research University of Cape Town 2003 Copies of this publication may be obtained from: The Administrative Officer Centre for Social Science Research University of Cape Town Private Bag Rondebosch, 7701 Tel: (021) 650 4656 Fax: (021) 650 4657 Email:
[email protected] Price in Southern Africa (incl. VAT and postage): R 15.00 or it can be downloaded from our website http://www.uct.ac.za/depts/cssr/pubs.html ISBN 0 7992 2205 4 © Centre for Social Science Research, UCT, 2003 CENTRE FOR SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH Social Surveys Unit PANEL ATTRITION IN SURVEY DATA: A LITERATURE REVIEW Una Lee CSSR Working Paper No. 41 September 2003 Una Lee is a Masters student in Economics at UCT. She graduated from Yale in 2002. In August 2003 she was appointed as a research assistant at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC. Panel Attrition in Survey Data: A Literature Review Panel studies, where the same individuals or households1 are interviewed at multiple points in time, have a number of advantages over cross-sectional studies for the study of certain social phenomenon. For example, cross-sectional data may document a constant unemployment rate over two periods of time, but will render no information content regarding whether bouts of unemployment are cyclical, with the same proportion of individuals transitioning in and out of the job market within the time period, or whether unemployed status is a chronic condition for a select group of individuals.