Summary: | The National Longitudinal Surveys(NLS)Series is sponsored by the United States
Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), and began
in the mid-1960s. Over the years, supportive funding has been
provided by the United States Department of Health and Human
Services, the National Institute on Aging, the National Institute
on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, the National Institute on Drug
Abuse, the Department of Defense and Armed Services, and the
National Institute of Education. The NLS is conducted by the United
States Bureau of the Census and the National Opinion Research
Center (NORC), University of Chicago, for the Center for Human
Resource Research, Ohio State University to whom BLS contracted
the project. The NLS surveys are part of a longitudinal research
program of the BLS which includes in-house analyses, an extramural
grant program, and other special projects. They are a set of surveys
each of which has gathered information at multiple points in time
on the labor market experiences of five specific groups of American
men and women: older men aged 45-59, mature women aged 30-44, young
men aged 14-24, young women aged 14-24, and youths aged 14-21. Each
of the 1960s cohorts has been surveyed 12 or more times over the
years, and the Youth cohort has been surveyed yearly since 1979 when
it was first added. The data permit the study of determinants of
labor supply, earnings and income distribution, job search and
separation, labor market inequities, and human capital investments.
In 1986, with funding from the National Institute of Child Health
and Human Development and a number of private foundations, the NLS
series was expanded to include surveys of a group of children born
to women of one of the national survey groups. During the 1986,
1988, 1990, and 1992 NLSY surveys, a battery of child
cognitive-socioemotional-physiological assessments was
administered to NLSY mothers and their children. Surveys of
the four original cohorts have, over the years, collected two
basic types of information: (1) core data on each respondent's
labor market experience, education, training, income, household
composition, marital status, and health limitations, and (2)
supplementary cohort-specific data focusing on the particular
stage of life or labor market attachment that each group was
experiencing. Thus, the surveys of young people have collected
data on their educational goals, high school and college experiences,
high school characteristics, and occupational aspirations and
expectations, as well as military service, and the surveys of women
have gathered data on topics such as fertility, child care, responsibility
for household tasks, care of parents, volunteer work, attitudes towards
women working, and job discrimination. As the older-aged cohorts of men
and women approached labor force withdrawal, surveys for these groups
collected information on their retirement plans, health status, and pension
benefits. In addition, specially constructed data files are available
for the NLS series, such as a file that specifies the relationships
among members of the four original cohorts living in the same household
at the time of the initial surveys, i.e., husband-wife, mother-daughter,
brother-sister, etc. The most current data for this series can be found
on the BLS Web site. |
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