Condensed vs. Detailed Schedule in Expenditure Surveys

High costs of surveys have brought pressure for less expensive ways of getting data on family expenditures, and have raised interest in opportunities to get such data through limited supplementary schedules attached to other surveys. An experiment to test this approach was undertaken by the (former) Bureau of Agricultural Economics and the (former) Bureau of Human Nutrition and Home Economics in simultaneous surveys of farm-operator families in contiguous areas. One included a few summary questions on family spending, the other a more detailed breakdown of the major expenditure categories. This paper summarizes the comparison of data obtained from the two surveys, and discusses the implications regarding the feasibility of this approach for gathering data on family expenditures