The Two-Income Trap - Elizabeth Warren [96]
Protection of Confidentiality
Before we entered the field, the study’s procedures and instruments were reviewed by Harvard University and the University of Texas to guarantee protection of study participants. Consistent with those reviews, access to debtor identity has been limited to guarantee respondents’ confidentiality. All researchers who had access to respondents’ names and data were required to sign a statement promising to maintain confidentiality. Finally, responses are reported only in the aggregate. When individual quotations are used, the debtors’ names and any other obvious identifiers have been changed.
Instruments
Data were collected using three types of instruments: debtor questionnaires, court records, and telephone interviews.
Questionnaires. The debtor questionnaires included the same demographic questions asked in the 1991 and 1999 research. In addition, many new questions were added in response to the data collected from the open-ended questions asked in 1991 and 1999, as well as developments in consumer law and practice. For example, the 2001 questionnaire asked debtors why they had filed for bankruptcy; the options provided on the questionnaire were based on the eight reasons most often given by debtors in 1991, plus an option to fill in a blank after “other.” In addition, because so many debtors in 1991 and 1999 had indicated that an illness or injury was the catalyst for their bankruptcy, the 2001 questionnaire asked debtors if they had lost income as a result of their own or a family member’s medical problems. The 2001 questionnaire also gathered information on health insurance, medical debt, child support, home ownership, mortgage debt, alternatives to bankruptcy, and number of dependents.
The majority of the questions were closed-ended and required the debtor only to check a box. One opened-ended question was for occupation: Debtors were asked for their occupations and, if married, the occupations of their spouses. Debtors’ answers were entered verbatim into the database. Dr. Sullivan coded each entry using the 1970 U.S. Census codes and the corresponding prestige scores developed by the National Opinion Research Center.7 Dr. Thorne recoded each entry to ensure accuracy and consistency.
In addition to the closed-ended questions, debtors were invited to use the back of the questionnaire to tell the story of their bankruptcies in their own words. The responses were included in the database as a text field.
At the bottom of the last page of the questionnaire, a form offered debtors $50 for participating in follow-up telephone interviews, with the possibility that they might eventually complete three such interviews over the next few years. Debtors who were willing to be interviewed signed the forms and provided their telephone numbers. Only those debtors who signed this form and provided a phone number were called. Debtors whose primary language was Spanish were given a Spanish version of the questionnaire. The questionnaire was translated into Spanish and back-translated into English to verify that the translation was accurate.
With the assistance of the Bankruptcy Court in Boston and the United States Trustee for Region One, the questionnaire was pretested in January 2001. Because this questionnaire was considerably more comprehensive than the one used in 1991, there was some concern about respondents’ reactions to the amount of time it would take to complete it. The average time required to complete the questionnaire was six minutes, and no respondent expressed any concern about the length of the questionnaire. After testing, the questionnaires were refined and retested in the Boston courthouse. Once that was complete, the same questionnaire was used in all districts.
The questionnaires asked each debtor for more than thirty pieces of information,