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Abstract
High costs of surveys have brought pressure for less expensive ways of getting data
on family expenditures, and have raised interest in opportunities to get such data
through limited supplementary schedules attached to other surveys. An experiment to
test this approach was undertaken by the (former) Bureau of Agricultural Economics
and the (former) Bureau of Human Nutrition and Home Economics in simultaneous
surveys of farm-operator families in contiguous areas. One included a few
summary questions on family spending, the other a more detailed breakdown of the
major expenditure categories. This paper summarizes the comparison of data obtained
from the two surveys, and discusses the implications regarding the feasibility
of this approach for gathering data on family expenditures.