Building Data Infrastructure: The Beginning School Study Data Archive

Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore MD

Investigators

Abstract

SES-1355911 Karl Alexander Johns Hopkins University The Beginning School Study (BSS), launched in Baltimore in 1982, has followed the life course of a large (N = 790) representative random sample of children who began first grade that year in 20 of Baltimore's public schools. The BSS study participants were interviewed individually most years from first grade through high school completion (often twice annually, fall and spring) and then again in two after high school interviews, four years later in 1998 at roughly age 22 and then again roughly a decade after high school (in 2006 at age 28). These post-high school interviews both achieved 80 percent coverage of the original group. Additionally, questionnaire data were procured from teachers most years through 9th grade, from parents most years through 10th grade, and from school records all along the way. This grant provides resources to supplement the BSS data archive with additional materials -- the original completed interviews and questionnaires from the project's nearly 25 years of fieldwork The BSS data archive is a valuable data resource that can be used to answer questions about the academic, personal and social development of typical urban youth as they advance through school in a high poverty setting and then begin to forge lives of their own as young adults. At present all the coded data gathered over the lifetime of this project are available to the wider research community at Harvard's Murray Research Center, a data archive and lending library for projects focused on youth development. The current grant completes the process by having the project's twenty-five years of original data forms -- interviews and questionnaires, added to the Murray Center data archive. The original forms include verbatim replies to the project's many open-ended questions and marginal notes made by the BSS staff that can help clarify ambiguities Broader Impacts The supplementary materials enhance the data archive stored at the Harvard Murray Research Center. The archival of the complete BSS data set and original survey instruments provides an invaluable set of longitudinal data on a cohort of study members that span over 25 years, from entry into elementary school through early adulthood. The final archival phase provides rich textured information that can help to illuminate the findings from the multiple surveys, schools records, and census data. BSS study results have been well reported in the both the local and national news and directly served as the bases for policy changes to address summer slippage, i.e., found that inner city poor students did not engage in academic enrichment activities over the summer and returned to school in the fall having digressed academically. Study findings were used by the federal government, Baltimore City, and local and state governments as the rationale for supporting year round schooling for socially and economically disadvantaged youth.