Continuity and Change in American Economic and Social Life: The PSID 2007-2011

Regents Of The University Of Michigan - Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor MI

Investigators

Abstract

The Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) is the world's longest running nationally representative panel survey. With nearly forty years of data on the same families and their descendents, the PSID can justly be considered a cornerstone of the data infrastructure for empirically-based social science research in the US and the world. Through its long-term measures of economic and social well being, and based on its weighted, representative sample of US families, the study has compelled both researchers and policy makers to confront and learn from the dynamism inherent in social and behavioral processes. The long panel, genealogical blood-line, and broad content of the data represent a unique and powerful opportunity to study evolution and change within the same families over a considerable time span. With its state-of-the-art facility to create customized data sets and codebooks including the possibility of transforming data into intergenerational and family-based analytic files, PSID's data archive has become among the world's most advanced and heavily used. The proposed activities include: data collection of the thirty-fifth through thirty-seventh waves of data from the PSID families; the ongoing refinement of questionnaire content to facilitate the investigation of current and emerging scientific research and policy questions; and the continued development of data use tools and resources for the state-of-the-art PSID web site and data center that will expedite the processing and delivery of data, and enhance its use by an increasingly multidisciplinary scientific community, without regard for geography. Continuing to collect additional waves of data from the PSID families will contribute broadly to the enhancement of scientific understanding by providing additional information on the dynamics of human and social behavior. Using these data, researchers can systematically investigate a myriad of questions in a variety of scientific disciplines involving the study of life-cycle opportunities and trajectories over time. Having a long panel of data improves the precision of the measurement as multiple measures are collected within the same families as well as from multiple family members over a period of many decades. The extended time series of data allows the estimation of robust, causal models and supports the study of economic behavior, for example, through changing conditions such as wage variations for different populations during the course of business cycles. In addition, the longitudinal data facilitate the conduct of cohort analysis as persons from one time period to another may be compared. These data also facilitate developmental analysis, as early experiences may be used to predict longer-term outcomes, such as the prediction of income and health in adulthood from early-life experiences. Additionally, the data archive itself is a valuable and powerful educational resource. The webbased data center has been used in the classroom setting at the university undergraduate and secondary school levels to illustrate basic concepts in scientific methods, including the composition of data, how it is structured, how different data can be linked together, and how data can be analyzed to make inferences about human behavior using statistical methodologies. The portrayal of these abstract concepts via a concrete mechanism such as a computer display of actual data and its manipulation via the Internet makes a powerful and easy-to-understand lesson for today's computer-savvy students. The tutorials provided on the website have been tested in the classroom and are used to further implement the educational mission of the data center. As described throughout the application, another broad impact of these proposed activities will be to maximize the use of an expanded data source by creating state-of-the-art tools for research and education and making them available freely on the Internet to all users without regard to geographic location. This free and open access of the data, easy-to-use data and data tools, as well as expanded content domains, will increase the opportunities for scientific progress and promote teaching and learning across a range of disciplines. The intellectual merits of the proposed activities include the theoretical significance of research that results from breakthroughs made by the expanded data archive in the multidisciplinary areas of human dynamics and development. The project team is highly qualified to conduct the proposed work, with an average across all team members of nearly 10 years experience working on the PSID. The likelihood that the activities proposed will in fact result in increases in scientific knowledge is strong, as the application describes.