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The Unemployment Insurance (UI) program was designed to reduce financial hardships for unemployed workers, assist with reemployment, and ameliorate the negative effects of unemployment on the economy as a whole. The loss of a job poses major hardships for many workers and their families. They often need to begin a potentially challenging search for new employment and also adjust their spending patterns and seek other sources of income. For qualified unemployed workers, UI benefits can help reduce the urgency for such adjustments. By providing temporary income support, UI benefits can smooth the transition to new circumstances, reduce financial distress, and provide workers with a buffer while they search for jobs. Furthermore, to reduce the potential incentive for UI recipients to prolong their unemployment, UI benefits are time-limited and provide only a partial replacement of lost earnings.

The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) wants to understand the extent to which the UI program reduces recipients’ financial hardships, the ways in which job search and reemployment expectations change during and after benefit collection, and customers’ satisfaction levels with the program. Understanding how workers adjust to the changes in income during and after UI claim spells would enable policymakers to assess how well the program is serving the nation’s workers and refine it to meet the needs of the unemployed while encouraging them to return to work. However, information about UI recipients is generally obtained from retrospective surveys, which might not provide sufficient insight into the dynamic adjustments after job loss or recipients’ satisfaction with the program structure. Therefore, DOL contracted with Mathematica Policy Research to conduct the Longitudinal Survey of Unemployment Insurance Recipients (LSUI), which provides DOL with new insights about these issues.

The LSUI involves two surveys timed to coincide with the early collection and benefit exhaustion experiences of UI recipients. It provides timely information about the experiences of UI recipients by collecting data during the beginning (weeks 6 through 15 of benefit collection) and shortly after (weeks 27 through 39 of benefit collection) the UI claim period. Specifically, it will address research questions in six broad topic areas: (1) adequacy of UI benefits, (2) reemployment expectations, (3) job search, (4) total UI benefit usage, (5) employment outcomes, and (6) customer satisfaction. The LSUI collects data from UI recipients in two geographic areas in California—the Los Angeles metropolitan statistical area (MSA) and a collection of smaller MSAs from California’s Central Valley.

Through these surveys, the study followed a group of UI recipients for about nine months to gain insight into the role that UI payments play in their lives. The two rounds of 25-minute surveys were administered by web and computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI). The purpose of the report is to summarize the data collection procedures used, and results obtained, in the LSUI.

Citation

Santos, B., Leonard, A., Potter, F. (2016). Mathematica. The 2015 Longitudinal Survey of Unemployment Insurance Recipients - California Pilot: Survey Methodology Report. Chief Evaluation Office, U.S. Department of Labor.

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The Department of Labor’s (DOL) Chief Evaluation Office (CEO) sponsors independent evaluations and research, primarily conducted by external, third-party contractors in accordance with the Department of Labor Evaluation Policy and CEO’s research development process.