Evaluation of the Ticket to Work Program, Implementation ...

C-6• Young SSI recipients who are 18 years old, are still receiving benefits because oftheir eligibility as children, and have not completed a re-determination under theadult eligibility criteriaAlthough these beneficiaries are not eligible for Ticket participation, they were includedin the survey samples to give complete coverage of the national beneficiary population.TTW participants can assign their Ticket under three payment systems: (1) outcomesonly;(2) milestone-outcome, or (3) under the traditional VR reimbursement system.Because the prevalence of the outcome-only payment type was low among Phase 1participants, both clustered and unclustered samples of participants were selected for thispayment type. The samples of participants using the milestone-outcome and traditionalpayment types were limited to the clustered sample. 4 The target number of completedinterviews for participants at Round 1 was 1,000 overall, with a target of approximately 333in each payment type stratum.Sample members in both the clustered and unclustered samples underwent the samelevel of locating activities to identify a telephone number so that a telephone interview couldbe attempted. For the unclustered sample, beneficiaries who could not be located or whorequired an in-person interview were “closed out” and classified as ineligible. For theclustered sample, beneficiaries who could not be located or who required an in-personinterview were eligible for a field followup and were assigned to field locators/interviewers.The beneficiaries who were classified as ineligible in the unclustered sample because of nofield followup are accounted for by the beneficiaries who had field followup in the clusteredsample. This process is analogous to the accepted practice of subsampling ofnonrespondents for more intensive effort and in this case is subsampling of cases for fieldfollowup.For fielding purposes, we selected 2.5 to 3 times as many cases as we needed to ensurean adequate pool of completed interviews. These samples were randomly partitioned intosubsamples (called “waves”). During the data collection period, we monitored the sampleresults and determined whether, and in what strata and PSUs, additional cases were needed.(Section D and Tables C.4 and C.5 provide further information about the completion ratesand the breakdown of completed interviews and ineligible respondents included in the countof respondents.)C. QUESTIONNAIRE DESIGN1. Questionnaire SectionsThe NBS collects data on a wide range of topics, including employment, disability,experience with a variety of SSA programs, employment services used in the past year, healthand functional status, health insurance, income and other assistance, and sociodemographicinformation. Sample persons who identify themselves as Ticket participants are asked about4 For the Round Two survey, unclustered samples are required for both the outcomes-only and themilestones plus outcomes payment types.Appendix C: National Beneficiary Survey Methodology