The impacts of the Social Security statement redesign on people’s knowledge and behavioral intentions
Creators: name: Perez-Arce, Francisco
Publisher: name: Open Science Framework
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: Social and Behavioral Sciences

description: I.A. Overview Social Security information can be complex but crucial for financial planning. The redesigned Social Security statement aims to better inform the public. We plan to assess the impact of the redesign on people’s understanding of Social Security, their interest in financial planning and for acquiring further information, and their intended behavior (such as intended age for claiming retirement benefits). We do this through a randomized control trial of an information treatment that uses the revised and old versions of the Statement for the treatment and control groups respectively. Finally, we provide an orthogonal treatment that encourages respondents to check the revised Statement through their my Social Security account, and test whether those exposed to the revised Statement are more likely to do so. In a pilot survey in June, we aimed to survey 1,500 respondents, broadly representative of the US-population of adults between the ages of 30 and 62. They were recruited from the Prolific panel. We will now invite 3,000 panelists from the Understanding America Study (UAS) to participate in this survey experiment. We expect about 2,400 respondents, between the ages of 25 and 70 who are not Social Security respondents. We over-sampled respondent so that roughly half of participants have not seen their statements (based on their answers to prior UAS surveys). I.B. Hypotheses (Statement) We will estimate the impact of three randomizations, to test three sets of hypotheses. HS1. The effect of the claiming ages element of the statement First, H.S.1 will the effect of one element in the new versus the old statement. This test the difference in element that describes the relationship between claiming age and benefit amount. To test H.S.1., we will present differences between those assigned to the redesigned versus the old statement versions in terms of the following outcomes: • Expected claiming ages H.S.2. The effect of the sample statement Second, H.S.2.the effect of the sample redesigned statement versus old statement. WE will test the effect of receiving the redesigned sample statement on the following outcomes: • Social Security knowledge test questions • Confidence in knowledge in the social security knowledge test questions (q11 in Section D) • Self-reported interest in learning more about Social Security and their own likely benefits • Satisfaction / opinions on the clarity and usefulness of the statement (including analysis of open ended responses) • Views on the likelihood of Social Security being able to pay benefits in the future. • Clicks on links to my Social Security account In all cases, we will analyze differences between treatment (redesigned statement) versus control (old statement) by conducting regressions of the outcomes of interest with and without controls (basic demographics, whether received statement information before), etc. We will study heterogeneity by race/ethnicity and gender, and on whether they have seen a social security statement recently. For these analyses, we will adjust for multiple hypothesis testing.