Wisconsin Children, Incomes, and Program Participation Survey (CHIPPS) of 1985

Study Description

The Wisconsin Children, Incomes, and Program Participation Survey (CHIPPS) was earlier termed WIPPS--Wisconsin Income and Program Participation Survey. WIPPS was the name used during the period when the principal investigators first proposed to conduct a general income survey that would have asked only a few questions about child support. The Office of Child Support Enforcement encouraged the investigators to develop a more child-support-specific survey, which was then was given the name "Wisconsin Children, Income, and Program Participation Survey (CHIPPS)." In the following documentation, we use the term "CHIPPS" for the survey as a whole. Questions originally developed for WIPPS appear in the Financial and Employment section. CHIPPS is a telephone survey of Wisconsin households conducted by the Institute for Research on Poverty (IRP) during the summer of 1985 with support from the Wisconsin Department of Health and Social Services. Its purpose was to examine the functioning of the child support system and to assist in development of the Child Support Assurance Program (CSAP). The survey had four particular goals:

1. To refine and update estimates of costs of or savings from the CSAP.
2. To help researchers understand the potential importance of the proposed CSAP by describing in detail the sources and amounts of household income, assets and debts, and the economic status of child-support-eligible households.
3. To describe current child support arrangements -- the proportion of eligible households with awards, types of visitation and custodial arrangements, and so on.
4. To evaluate the public's perceptions concerning the amounts of child support to be awarded under varying circumstances, the conditions under which the amount should be changed, and the desirability of using wage assignments to collect support orders.

Extent of Collection: 1105 Variables, 1556 Cases.

Return to main CHIPPS archive page.

Email: disc@mailplus.wisc.edu