Consumer durables and installment debt
Subtitle: a study of American households, 1967-1970
By: principal investigators, Gary Hendricks and Kenwood C. Youmans
Series: ICPSR -- 7497; ICPSR (Series) -- 7497
Publisher: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor
Published: 1976
Place of publication: Ann Arbor, Mich
Language: und
Format: [computer file] :
Subjects: Installment plan; Consumers; Attitudes; Consumption (Economics); Consumer Durable goods
Description: The purpose of this four-year panel study was to investigate two major and related aspects of consumer behavior: expenditures on major consumer durable goods and the use of installment credit. The study focused on four-year trends in these two important characteristics of households, the factors which underlie these trends, and what may have altered and may continue to alter these relationships. In each of the four panel interviews, detailed questions were asked regarding the income of the family, purchases of durables, and the current level of financial debt. The extent of the family's holdings of financial assets including houses, amounts in savings and checking accounts, value of stocks and bonds, etc., was also ascertained. There is some information on stocks of consumer durables owned at the time of the first interview, also included are complete details on initial stocks of automobiles and subsequent changes in them. Extensive data were gathered on attitudes toward the use of various financial instruments (particularly installment debt), the level of the family's satisfaction with its current assets, and the family's subjective analysis of its past financial progress and future prospects. Data collection began in 1967.

There were 2,604 families who completed the first interview that were eligible for reinterview. In 1970, the last year of data collection, 1,434 families had completed all four interviews. The data are available as a four-year merged file. Two versions of this dataset are available: one with 1,659 variables containing all the family data including information on the first car, usually the newest, owned at the time of each interview, the other dataset has about 400 additional variables which give information about each car (up to three) owned by panel families at the time of each interview during the four-year period.
Notes: ICPSR data class: Class IV.

Chronological coverage: 1967-1970.

United States.

Version 1: 1,659 variables; version 2: about 2,059 variables.

Hendricks, Gary, Kenwood C. Youmans, and Janet Keller. Consumer Durables and Installment Debt: A Study of American Households, Ann Arbor, MI: Institute for Social Research, 1973.