Abstract

Of the owners and renters who were eligible for the 2007 Community Advantage Panel Survey interviews, 72% and 74% completed the survey, respectively. Most respondents who were contacted in 2007 were willing to participate in the survey, as less than 1% of the eligible sample resulted in hard refusals. The majority of those cases that were not completed simply could not be contacted, either because of incorrect contact information or because tracing was unsuccessful. For both owners and renters, approximately half of the baseline sample has participated in all survey years. Because we expect attrition to continue to be a concern in 2008, we have prioritized respondents according to their likelihood of attrition and have implemented a special intervention to boost the response rates of these individuals. Overall, attrition in 2007, relative to baseline, is most pronounced among males, minorities, the less-educated, those over 40 years of age, and residents of Mississippi and Arizona. In consequence of these attrition patterns and initial selectivity in the baseline owners sample, a few important differences exist between the baseline CAP owners and the Self-Help borrowers who they were chosen to represent. CAP survey owners are more likely to be female and White. In addition, they have slightly higher origination credit scores and origination LTV ratios, on average, and are less likely to have incomes in excess of 80% AMI.