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Description

For all persons, INCINT reports the total taxable interest income they received from savings accounts, bonds, NOW accounts, money market accounts, or similar types of investments during the current calendar year. Persons were instructed to report only their portion of any interest income from joint accounts. Using the reported income information, annual income amounts were then edited and imputed for every record on the full-year file. Please refer to the IPUMS user note on Income Data in MEPS for more information on the collection, editing (including top- and bottom-coding), and imputation of income variables in MEPS, as well as changes to the target population for income data collection over time. Users may also be interested in the data quality flag, QINCINT, which reports the editing methods for used for INCINT.

If respondents needed more information about what types of income to report as interest income, they were provided with the additional guidance: "Include interest income from seller-financed mortgages, banks, savings and loan associations, money market certificates, credit unions, savings bonds, etc. These amounts can be found on forms 1099-INT or 1099-OID."

Information on the IPUMS defined-universe for this variable[show more]

Users may wish to note that while IPUMS defines the universe for this variable as all persons, certain persons were explicitly targeted to answer questions about specific income sources. In addition to the target population of persons who were asked specifically about interest income, all persons in the household were eligible to list additional income from "other" sources, which includes income from sources previously asked about in the survey (such as interest income). It is unclear if interest income reported as an "other" income source is counted in interest income or "other" income. Because all persons could technically report interest income via the "other" income questionnaire item, IPUMS staff report the universe for INCINT as being "All Persons." Users may also wish to note that in the original public use MEPS data files, no income variables have cases explicitly coded as out of universe; both persons who directly report earning zero dollars of income from a source and persons who are not explicitly asked about that income source have values of zero.