This document is about the user guide for the 2016 Form 5500 Private Pension Plan Research File. It explains the methodology used to select, edit, and classify the pension plans included in the research file, which is the data source for the annual Private Pension Plan Bulletin published by the Department of Labor. The guide covers topics such as the Form 5500 filing requirements, data extraction and sampling, editing of the data, and the creation of derived variables to categorize the plans.