The Two-Income Trap - Elizabeth Warren [97]
Court Records. For every questionnaire that debtors returned, a copy of the corresponding court records was collected; thus the researchers coded court record data from all 2,220 cases in the core and supplemental samples. Court records for bankruptcy are a matter of public record. A photocopy of the court records or a printout from the online court records was added to each debtor’s file.
Three people with legal training reviewed the court records, determined which information to code, and assisted in the development of a coding program for data entry. The information reported in the debtors’ schedules, which are filed under penalty of perjury, includes income, assets, debts, household expenses, and several legal events. The research team entered approximately 160 pieces of information from each case into the database, for a total of more than 350,000 pieces of information gathered from the court records.
Telephone Surveys. The telephone survey comprised four specialized schedules: general questions presented to all respondents, a medical section presented to those who indicated that a medical problem had contributed to their bankruptcies, a small business section presented to current or former small business owners, and a homeowner section presented to those debtors who owned a home at the time of filing or who had owned a home within the previous five years but had lost it through foreclosure or other financial problems. Interviews took about twenty minutes for each section.
Telephone interviewers were all trained and supervised by Dr. Thorne. All initial interviewers were graduate students or postdoctoral students in sociology; later, other trained interviewers were added. All interview responses were entered directly into a Microsoft Access database designed specifically for this project. Approximately 226,000 pieces of data from the telephone survey were entered in the database.
Response Rates
In some districts, the Chapter 7 and Chapter 13 trustees distributed and collected the questionnaires; in other districts, we trained a local person to complete the distribution and collection, with the cooperation of the trustees. In almost all cases, the questionnaires were distributed and completed when the debtors attended a mandatory meeting at the courthouse, although a few people took their questionnaires home and returned them by mail a few days later.
Without the cooperation of the trustees, it would have been almost impossible to gather a useful sample from among the debtors attending these meetings. The need to rely on the trustees, however, meant that we lost some degree of control over the distribution of the questionnaires. Although we can be nearly certain that the questionnaires were distributed to every debtor who attended a meeting scheduled on a particular day, on some days the trustees did not distribute questionnaires, often because they had no help, because they felt especially pressed for time, or because they forgot. In one district, the Middle District of Tennessee, the trustees went far beyond our expectations and maintained especially careful records, and we could determine that the response rate was 99 percent. In the remaining four districts, however, we could not impose on the trustees to keep similar records, so it is not possible to identify the questionnaire response rates with precision. We estimate that in Texas and Illinois, response rates were approximately 90 percent on the days the trustees distributed the questionnaires. In Illinois, California, and Pennsylvania, when someone other than the trustee distributed the questionnaires, the response rates were lower, estimated at about 60 percent, 55 percent, and 45 percent, respectively.
Because court records are public data, we collected court records for each debtor in the sample, effectively a 100 percent response rate.
Debtors from the core sample and