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By Root 1243 0

Katherine Porter, Harvard Law School ’01, John Pottow, Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Michigan, and Dr. Deborah Thorne, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Ohio University, served, in turn, as Project Director, each with a hand in both the design of portions of the project as well as direct oversight of the data collection. These dozen principal investigators brought expertise from a number of policy areas such as family economics, demographics, employment, health care finance, housing policy, small business, women’s issues, law, sociology, business, and economics, as well as specific skills in data collection and analysis.

The 2001 Consumer Bankruptcy Project builds on three previous empirical studies of families that file for personal bankruptcy, conducted by Sullivan, Warren, and Westbrook. The earlier Consumer Bankruptcy Projects are detailed in the Appendices to As We Forgive Our Debtors1 (1981 study) and The Fragile Middle Class2 (1991 study). In addition, there was a supplementary study in 1999, the details of which are noted in Jacoby, Sullivan, and Warren’s “Rethinking the Debates over Health Care Financing: Evidence from the Bankruptcy Courts.”3

Development of the Sample

Debtors who file for Chapter 7 and Chapter 13 bankruptcies must attend a meeting with the bankruptcy trustee assigned to the case. The debtor’s attorney nearly always attends the meeting with the debtor. The debtor’s creditors receive formal notice of the meeting and are invited to attend as well. The 2001 core sample was constructed by distributing questionnaires to debtors who attended these meetings in the target cities on the target dates. The goal was to collect a quota of 250 questionnaires from each district, with the proportion of Chapter 7 and Chapter 13 questionnaires in the sample reflecting the proportion that occurred naturally in each district. For example, in the Central District of California, 80 percent of the petitions filed in 2000 were for Chapter 7 bankruptcies and 20 percent were for Chapter 13 bankruptcies. Thus, of the 250 questionnaires collected in this district in 2001, the researchers sought to match that same distribution: 200 Chapter 7 questionnaires and fifty Chapter 13 questionnaires. In order to achieve this distribution, questionnaires were distributed at Chapter 7 meetings until 200 debtors responded and at Chapter 13 meetings until fifty debtors responded. The same approach—quota sampling by district, by type of chapter—was followed in each of the other four districts until a full sample of 250 cases per district was collected. The total 1,250 cases (250 cases per district) constitute what is called the “core sample,” which includes a split between Chapter 7 and Chapter 13 cases that is representative in each of the filing districts.

One questionnaire was completed per case. When couples filed jointly, they completed a single questionnaire. The questionnaire, however, collected separate demographic data for both husband and wife. The core sample consists of 1,250 cases, but because 320 of those cases were married couples filing jointly, there are 1,570 people in the core sample who filed for bankruptcy.

Core Sample

The 2001 core sample was drawn from California, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Texas. This overlaps with the 1991 core sample, which was drawn from the same five states, and with the 1981 sample, which was drawn from three of the five states (Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Texas). Rather than drawing from multiple districts in each state, as in the earlier study, the 2001 Consumer Bankruptcy Project concentrated its resources by drawing a larger sample from one district per state: the Central District of California, which includes Los Angeles; the Northern District of Illinois, which includes Chicago; the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, which includes Philadelphia; the Middle District of Tennessee, which includes Nashville; and the Northern District of Texas, which includes Dallas.4 These five states represented 407,047 nonbusiness Chapter 7 and Chapter 13 filings in 2001,