RAND Roybal Center for Financial Decision Making
About Us
The RAND Roybal Center for Financial Decision Making was founded in 2004 with a grant from the National Institute on Aging (NIA). Its goal is to contribute to a better understanding of how people reach decisions about issues affecting their economic status in old age and inform how public policy can educate or otherwise help people align decisions with their long-term objectives.
The Center is housed in RAND Labor and Population. The Center draws on the expertise of staff in Labor and Population as well as on experts from outside RAND. Our main instrument is the American Life Panel. This is an Internet panel of respondents 40 and over. Respondents in the panel either use their own computer to log on to the Internet or a Web TV, which allows them to access the Internet, using their television and a telephone line. This technology allows respondents who did not have previous Internet access to participate in the panel and furthermore use the Web TVs for browsing the Internet and communicating with email.
By providing people without current Internet access with a web-TV, we draw respondents into the sample with little or no “on-line” experience. Since Internet access in the population will continue to grow in the foreseeable future, our approach anticipates a future in which Internet access, also among elderly households, is much more common than today. In that sense we aim at developing tools today that can be applied tomorrow.
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