Unified BHPS Work-Life Histories: Combining Multiple Sources into a User-Friendly Format

Abstract

Longitudinal data is often difficult to use, and continuous histories collected in a panel are a particularly unfriendly case. This paper reports an exercise to re-organise the British Household Panel Study's work-life history data into a format more convenient for analysis. The British Household Panel Study collects extensive labour market history information from its respondents, both during the panel period and retrospectively from labour market entry. That this information is of necessity stored in multiple locations, and of varying levels of detail, has made use somewhat inconvenient. This paper describes an exercise to bring the labour market information together in a more convenient format. It also considers some of the problems of retrospective and panel longitudinal data, and discusses issues of recall error and measurement error. The data files described are available through the UK Data Archive. Longitudinal Data, Work-Life Histories, Recall Bias, Measurement Error.

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Dex, S. (1995), ‘The reliability of recall data: A literature review’, Bulletin de Methodologie Sociologique (49).

Dex, S. and A. McCulloch (1997), ‘The reliability of retrospective unemployment history data’. Unpublished paper, Judge Institute for Management Studies, Cambridge.

Elias, P. (1996), Who forgot they were unemployed?'. Unpublished paper. Institute for Employment Research, University of Warwick.

Elias, P. (1997), ‘Redundancy and reskilling’. Seminar paper presented at ESRC Research Centre on Micro-social Change, University of Essex.

Elias. P., K. Halstead and K. Prandy (1993), Computer Assisted Standard Occupational Coding, HMSO, London.

Kalton, G. and D. B. McMillen (1986), ‘Nonsampling error issues in the Survey of Income and Program Participation’, SIPP Working Paper 8602. US Bureau of the Census, Washington, DC.

Paull, G. (1996), ‘Dynamic labour market behaviour in the British Household Panel Survey: The effects of recall bias and panel attrition’. Unpublished paper, Institute for Fiscal Studies.

Rose, D., H. Laurie and K. Perrin (1994), ‘Wave 1/wave 2 cross-wave report’. Internal report, ESRC Research Centre on Micro-social Change.

Taylor, M. (1996), ‘British Household Panel Survey User Manual’, User documentation, ESRC Research Centre on Micro-social Change.