Economic Status, Health, and Well-Being Over the Life Course and Across Generations

Investigators:   Robert F. Schoeni, Frank P. Stafford, Peter A. Ubel

Spanning nearly four decades by 2007, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) is the world’s longest running panel survey. The resulting data archive presents research opportunities for breakthroughs in understanding the connections between economic status, health and well-being across generations and over the life course. The long panel, genealogical blood-line, and broad content of the data represent a unique opportunity for a robust, multi-perspective study of life course evolution and change within families and individuals and by lineage over three and now four generations. Based on relational data structures and advanced web-based archiving and delivery tools, we now have a public web-based facility for users worldwide to create customized data extracts and codebooks based on more than 55,000 variables from over 65,000 individuals over nearly four decades of their lives. The study’s long-term span, genealogical design, and comprehensive content have been critical to understanding the life course effects of early childhood circumstances and experience on health, economic well-being and mortality across time and space. To utilize the existing resources, add important content domains in the area of health and aging, increase innovation through the conduct and evaluation of a supplemental data collection, and encourage the use of these data in a multi-disciplinary scientific community, we propose three specific aims:



1. We propose to collect data from PSID families to expand the scientific potential of the data archive for the study of economic status, health, and well-being over the life course and across generations.

2. We propose to generate significant multi-disciplinary scientific contributions to research on life course and generational health, SES, and well-being within the fields of economics, epidemiology, psychology, medicine, and survey methods using the full archive of PSID data, 1968-2011, in order to set in motion additional research activity in these areas.

3. The third aim is to facilitate and promote the use of the health, wealth, and pension data in the PSID by the scientific community by conducting pilot grant programs and scientific workshops targeting the themes of pensions, private accounts, and retirement savings throughout the life course and intra- and intergenerational connections in health and socioeconomic status within the family, holding a series of user workshops and annual exhibits at professional meetings such as AEA, PAA, GSA, and ASA, and developing data user tools including the family identification mapping system (FIMs) to make it easier for users to create intra- and intergenerational data extracts.

Funding Period: 03/15/2007 to 02/29/2012


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