The Panel Study of Income Dynamics: overview, recent innovations, and potential for life course research

Abstract

Spanning over four decades, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) is the world's longestrunning household panel survey. The resulting data archive presents research opportunities for breakthroughs in understanding the connections between economic status, health and wellbeing across generations and over the life course. The long panel, genealogical design, and broad content of the data represent an unique opportunity for a multi-perspective study of life course evolution and change within families over multiple generations. Based on relational data structures and advanced web-based archiving and delivery tools, the PSID has a publicly available web-based facility for users worldwide to create customized data extracts and codebooks, based on nearly 70,000 variables from over 70,000 individuals over 44 years. This paper provides an overview of the PSID and its supplemental studies, the Disability and Use of Time Supplement, the Child Development Supplement, and the Transition into Adulthood study, and describes features and recent enhancements that have increased the potential of the archive for studying life course development.

New Estimates of the Sandwich Generation in the 2013 Panel Study of Income Dynamics

“…However, Wiemers and Bianchi (2015) show that the demographic characteristics of a similar sample match Census, Current Population Survey, and National Survey of Households and Families quite closely. The PSID has also been shown to be population representative on a broad range of characteristics producing comparable estimates to the American Time Use Survey for time use behaviors, to the National Health Interview Survey for health status and health behaviors, and to the Current Population Survey for income (McGonagle et al, 2012).…”

“…This genealogical design implies that the study provides data on a sample of extended families at each wave. In each wave, the PSID includes information on respondent's economic circumstances, demographic characteristics, health, and detailed consumption (see McGonagle, Schoeni, Sastry, & Freedman, 2012 for more information about the PSID).…”

Examining the life course sequence of intending to move and moving

“…We use data from the PSID, an ongoing longitudinal project that follows the lives of a sample of American families. Begun in 1968, as the members of sample families form economically independent households, they are interviewed separately, increasing the size of the sample over time (McGonagle, Schoeni, Sastry, & Freedman, 2012;Institute for Social Research, 2015b. The research uses a subset of the PSID data from the 1997 to 2013 waves, during which the survey was fielded biennially, for a total of nine waves of data.…”

“…… In a married-couple family, the Head is defined as the husband-unless he is physically or mentally incapable of being interviewed. The Head can also be a single female" (McGonagle et al, 2012). Because most of our modelling data are at the family unit level, this bias towards the male as head does not substantially affect our data.…”

When does attrition lead to biased estimates of alcohol consumption? Bias analysis for loss to follow‐up in 30 longitudinal cohorts

“…have been even greater (Johnson & Wislar, 2012;Tolonen et al, 2006). Attrition rates in large-scale longitudinal studies in the United States depend on the modality of data collection [e.g., mail, cellphone, and web] (Patrick et al, 2017) and range, for example, from 25% in the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent to Adult Health (Harris et al, 2019), to 40-55% in the National Longitudinal Study of Youth (Aughinbaugh & Gardecki, 2007), 40-60% in the Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health study (Hyland et al, 2017), 44% in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (McGonagle, Schoeni, Sastry, & Freedman, 2013), and 30-50% in other large-scale longitudinal studies in the United States and other countries (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2020a, 2020b.…”