In July and August 2009, the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College (CRR) conducted a survey to gauge three things: 1) how people were responding to the loss of their retirement assets due to the financial crisis; 2) who was responding by increasing their expected working life; and 3) how people were responding to realistic information about how long they would have to work or how much they would have to save in order to recoup their financial losses. This paper documents how the survey was conducted and contains all the relevant information to enable new users to start using this survey for their own research. The paper is organized as follows. Section 1 discusses the survey methodology. Section 2 compares the demographic and basic characteristics between this survey and two nationally representative national surveys, the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) and the Current Population Survey (CPS). Section 3 discusses the weight adjustments needed to make the sample more representative of the U.S. population. Section 4 conducts a standard non-response analysis and Section 5 compares our findings to other surveys that also tried to gauge the reaction to the financial downturn. Section 6 concludes.
