RAND Roybal Center for Financial Decision Making
Methodology
The Center primarily provides a laboratory to study financial decision making by households. Within RAND, we finance a number of pilot projects each year, which address different aspects of decision making. Pilot projects that are currently planned include “the use of stated preferences in the design of pension products or retirement paths”, “a survey instrument to better understand Social Security claiming behavior”, “the presentation of investment choices”. Other plans include “real life” investment games, surveys of financial knowledge, and social security expectations.
Interviews or experiments are programmed in RAND's MMIC™ interview package. MMIC™ is platform independent and allows for migration across interview modes with minimal effort. Respondents can start and stop an interview whenever they like; if an interview gets interrupted, information is captured and a respondent can continue where they left off. Since respondents participate regularly, a wealth of background information is available, which can be added to the new data that are being collected. We have a toll-free number available to participants if they have questions regarding the survey or need technical assistance.
Researchers planning an interview submit a draft to the Roybal staff for programming. The resulting instrument is available for testing on the Internet, until the researcher is satisfied with the result. Once the instrument is in the field, results are available on-line in real time. That is, each time a respondent finishes an interview, the data are added to the database and are available for analysis at that time. Hence, researchers do not have to wait until the end of the field period before they can access the data.
In principle, data collected in the Center are available for use by any interested researcher at zero cost.
Top