Student Financial Survey 2001-2002 Methodology

CHAPTE R1INTRODUCTION
1.3 METHODOLOGY

This study is designed to capture, from a random sample of post-secondary students across the country,
baseline information about the financial situation of students as they begin a school year, and then a
snapshot of their monthly income and expenditures across the school year.

Recruitment of the student panel for the study was conducted by telephone, based on a largely national,
random sample. The sample of telephone numbers was drawn from a listing of all telephone numbers in
the country, however, numbers located in areas more than 100 kilometres from an urban centre were
excluded, in order to increase the incidence of finding post-secondary students. A sample of 2,100
students was recruited this way in September 2001. Contacts with over 48,000 telephone numbers were
attempted in order to obtain the 2,100 cases in the panel. The incidence of finding post-secondary
education students in the random sample was seven per cent (slightly higher than the five per cent
average across the country).

The purpose of the study was introduced to potential respondents and the nature of participation
explained. The response rate to the recruitment was 70 per cent. The recruitment was conducted in both
languages and the self-administered survey questionnaires were also available in both languages.

The survey information was intended to be collected using a self-administered approach, through the
Internet. Over the course of the study it was decided that telephone follow-up data collection would also
be required each month, to maintain the highest possible participation of the student panel from month
to month over the school year. An initial baseline survey in October collected basic information about
students education, financial status at the beginning of the school year and their socio-demographic
characteristics (e.g., age, gender, region, etc.).

The survey required just over 15 minutes to complete over the Internet. Just over 1,100 surveys were
completed online, and an additional 427 cases were collected by telephone for a total of 1,543 cases in
the baseline. This is a response rate of 73 per cent (2,100 were originally recruited). The reference
timeframe set for the baseline (i.e., the period for which students were to report financial information
such as income received and expenditures prepaid towards the school year) was over the summer
months, ending just prior to the school year.

Waves of the panel survey took place at the start of each month and continued for roughly two weeks.
Typically, two in three cases were collected over the Internet and the remaining one in three were
collected by telephone. Participation slowly eroded over the eight months of the school year, however,
the study was able to retain roughly 60 per cent of the overall baseline sample until the end of the
survey. Table 1 demonstrates the number of students participating at each wave and the response rate
(from the baseline survey of 1,543). The two biggest drops in response rates (after the initial drop-off
from recruitment to baseline) were in January and May, when five and ten per cent of the sample,
respectively, were lost to attrition. In each new wave, students were asked to report their income and
expenditures during the entire previous calendar month (i.e., income and expenses for September were
reported in the October wave of the survey).
In addition to the basic questions asked each month in the follow-up survey, three sets of additional
questions were posed. In January, students were asked to report the average grade they had received for
the previous semester, as well as details about their employment during the first semester (including
average hours worked). In March, students were asked about their assets, including cars, computers and
electronics. In the last wave, in April, students were asked about the total amount that they received in
government loans (as a final check of the information reported during the year), the new balance on their
credit cards and whether or not they were graduating and, if not, what their intentions were for school
next year.

Toward the end of the follow-up survey period, it became apparent that there was some confusion in the
interpretation of the reporting base for providing expenditure figures for food, personal care,
entertainment and clothing and jewellery. Some students reported a figure spent per month and some
reported a figure spent per week. (Additional efforts were made to clarify the actual reporting base with
each student.) Answers were obtained for over 80 per cent of the sample and a reporting base was
attributed when the information was missing, based on the average amounts reported by other students
in the same living conditions.

At the end of data collection a single database was built to hold all responses from baseline to final
follow-up wave for each of the 1,543 students in the sample. The results were weighted by gender and
region, as there was a slight under sampling of male students (by six per cent) and of students in Ontario
and Quebec (by six and eight per cent, respectively).

A number of steps were taken to finalize the file before proceeding with the analysis and reporting of
survey results. First, some coding was conducted in an attempt to categorize openended responses.
Second, all continuous variable responses (including amounts of reported income and expenditure) were
examined for outliers. This involved excluding responses that were quite far outside the central tendency
of responses.

As shown in the table on participation rates by month, not all 1,543 students participated in each follow-
up wave. Therefore, there were missing data for many student records. In order to rely on a common
respondent pool for the purposes of examining monthly budgets, the analysis of financial data included
only the students who completed at least four of the eight follow-up survey waves. This represented
1,257 of the 1,543 students in the baseline. For these 1,257 students, any missing data in the financial
fields were attributed (or filled in) with the most likely response, which was typically arrived at by
examining adjacent months. That is, if a student did not complete the March wave, we attributed the
missing information on the basis of their February responses. In a few cases (such as for government
loans in January and parental support in December) another approach was taken. In these cases, missing
values were attributed on the basis of the average amount reported by a similar group of students
(i.e., same age, same living arrangements, same school type and status) for that individual month. This
was done because there were spikes in the amounts reported in some types of income and expenditure
for particular months.

The last step prior to the analysis of results was to create new variables in the database to calculate total
values for the year and percentages of income and expenditure from specific sources (of all students and
for each months income and expenditures).
Note to the Reader
A few issues should be noted about the reporting of results. The first is to advise that, in interpreting
results, the reader always consider the base of students used to calculate financial data (e.g., amounts of
income, expenditures and debt); in particular, whether figures are based on all students or only those
students for whom the particular indicator is applicable. For example, the average reported amount of
summer employment earnings across the entire survey is $3,500, however, when only those students
who worked in the summer are considered, the average increases to $4,000. In most cases, the numbers
reported in this document are calculated as an average (per student) based on the affected segment of the
student pool. Monthly patterns of income and expenditures, however, were examined using a common
base of all students.

The second element to be noted is that all dollar figures above $999 were rounded to the nearest $100.

Finally, many of the survey results differentiate on the basis of age. Unless controlled for, the age
relationship can, in turn, generate findings that are a function of age. For example, an analysis of
students use of credit cards by region shows that Quebec students have the lowest incidence of owning
a card. However, younger students are also less likely to have credit cards and, since Quebec students
are younger (as a result of the CEGEP system in that province), the regional difference in credit card
ownership owes more to regional differences in the age distribution of the student population than to
region itself. Where possible, the analyses controlled for age when examining results by other
characteristics that are shown to be closely associated with age (e.g., marital status, dependents, living
arrangements). The difficulty, however, is that the number of cases and general complexity of the data
set made this type of control difficult in some instances. For example, the results in the financial chapter
do not control for age in any way.

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