Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics: A Survey Overview

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Survey objectives
What's new?
Survey design
Household relationships
SLID: a longitudinal survey
Computer-assisted telephone interviewing

Survey objectives

The Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics (SLID) is an important source for income data for Canadian families, households and individuals. Introduced in 1993, SLID provides an added dimension to traditional surveys on labour market activity and income: the changes experienced by individuals and families through time. At the heart of the survey's objectives is the understanding of the economic well-being of Canadians.

Starting with reference year 1996, the Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics (SLID) officially replaced the annual Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF). Though the income content of the two surveys is similar, SLID adds a large selection of variables that capture transitions in Canadian jobs, income and family events.

SLID, as a longitudinal survey, interviews the same people from one year to the next for a period of six years. The survey's longitudinal dimension allows evaluation of concurrent and often related events, which yields greater insight on the nature and extent of poverty in Canada: What socio-economic shifts do individuals and families live through?  How do these shifts vary with changes in their paid work, family make-up, receipt of government transfers and other factors? What proportion of households are persistently poor year after year, and what makes it possible for others to emerge from periods of low income?

SLID also provides information on a broad selection of human capital variables, labour force experiences and demographic characteristics such as education, family relationships and household composition. Its breadth of content combined with a relatively large sample makes it a unique and valuable data set.

What's new?

New version of SLID database

The Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics (SLID) database is expanding this year to include micro-data from the cross-sectional Survey of Consumer finance (SCF) from 1976 to 1997 inclusive.

Some of the SCF information is now available through the SLID entities database.  This will permit users to access a longer period of historical data from a unique database.  Users still have the choice of using the SCF historical files, if it better suits their needs.

Data from SCF were adapted as much as possible to SLID concepts variables.  Some concepts were almost identical between the two surveys, such as income data, allowing SCF variables to be easily transformed into SLID variables. Nevertheless, other SCF concepts differed and thus some variables were modified to follow SLID concepts. For example because the SCF “head of family” concept differs from the SLID “major income earner” concept, variables related to the family characteristics were converted.

Most of the income variables as well as others, such as demographic information, were converted in this release.  Other SCF data will be transformed and added to the SLID database in the future.

Since SLID data starts with reference year 1993, there are five years of overlap between the two surveys where users have to specify which survey they intend to be using when accessing micro data through the extraction tool – SLIDRET (see SLIDRET User’s manual – cross-sectional section).

For further information on this and for a list of the variables available using SLID concepts from SCF, see section Notes and Definitions – Comparisons between data up to 1995 and data since 1996.

Introduction of new variables

Universal Child Care Benefit

The Universal Child Care Benefit for children under 6 was introduced in the second half of 2006. Families with children under 6 year of age can receive $100 per month for each eligible child. This benefit is taxable and is available to all families. A new variable called "Child Benefits" has also been created. This variable represents the sum of the regular Child Tax Benefits and Universal Child Care Benefit.

Inter-household transfers

Inter-Household Transfers represent money given or received to or from family members outside the household. Total amounts transferred are captured and as well as the countries with which these exchanges took place. In 2006, this information was asked to respondents 16 to 69 years of age. This information is only available at the individual level.

Capital Gains

In addition to gathering information on Taxable Capital Gains, Total Capital Gains and Total Income with Total Capital Gains are available for 2006.

Disability Portion of Canada Pension Plan & Quebec Pension Plan

As of 2006, this information has been captured for individuals who granted permission for the access to their personal income tax form (T1). As of 2007, this information will be available for all respondents 16 years of age and over.

Energy Rebates and Credits, Federal

Added in 2006, this variable includes amounts for energy rebates and credits at the federal level. In 2006, this variable only included the Federal Energy Cost Benefit program. This variable is subsequently added to the "Goods and Services Tax (GST) and Harmonized Sales Tax (HST) credits" variable.

Energy Rebates and Credits, Provincial

Added in 2006, this variable includes some amounts for energy rebates and credits at the provincial level. In 2006, this variable only included the Alberta Resource Rebate program. This variable is subsequently added to the "Provincial and territorial tax credits" variable.

Student loans

In 2006, two student loan variables were introduced. These variables indicate whether respondents aged 16 to 45 who had some educational activity in the reference year had received a student loan in the reference year and the amount borrowed. For more information, please see the section Survey Content - Education.

Changes to variables

For this release, SLID revised the following variable:

Historical revision of Major Field of Study for years 1993 to 2003

SLID used to code all fields of study of post-secondary programs and job-related courses according to the Major Field of Study (MFS) classification. However, starting in 2004, SLID adopted the Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP) because it was a detailed and proven classification with a 20-year history, was up to date, had an established mechanism for updates and a track record of regular updates, and had a proper hierarchical coding structure. As an added advantage, it would provide comparability with the United States. CIP is now the Statistics Canada standard for field of study classification.

In SLID, all the fields of study reported prior to reference year 2004 were coded according to the MFS classification. For historical comparison purposes, all these MFS codes were converted into CIP codes. Researchers can now use the CIP to do historical analysis of fields of studies back to 1993.