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

Abstract

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 will be made available through the Data Archive. SummaryThe British Household Panel Study collects extensive information on respondents' labour market status, (i) at the time of interview at each wave of the panel, (ii) through the period between 1 September a year before and the interview date, and (iii) retrospectively from first leaving full-time education. Because the retrospective information was collected in two tranches (one focusing on employment status, the other on occupational information) there are four different types of labour-market history information, located (at Wave 5) in twelve different files in the BHPS database. This complexity is a necessary aspect of longitudinal information, but it has inhibited use of the work-life history data. In order to facilitate such use, a set of 'reconciled' files has been created, constituting single continuous records each containing all the information of a particular type in a single location. This paper describes the creation of the files, examines their output and discusses some aspects of measurement error and recall bias relevant to the exercise.The first part of the exercise is to take the 'current status' information and combine it with the inter-wave history, for each wave, and then to combine the five waves thus creating a continuous record from September 1990 to the September 1995 (and later). The second stage is to take the life-time employment status history collected at Wave 2, and the life-time occupational history collected at Wave 3, and to combine each of them with analogous information drawn from the combined panel file, thus creating employment and occupational histories that stretch from labour-market entry to the latest wave. The third stage is to combine these two extended life-time histories into a single record which contains both employment-status information (with good information about non-employed spells) and occupational information (that is, details about the job held during each employed spell).The paper describes the methods used, in terms of an initial specification and its detailed implementation, and goes on to consider the output produced. By including the retrospective data we have information stretching back many decades, though from the point of view of breatdh of detail and quality of recall the panelderived data (covering 1990-95) are much better. When we compare data from different sources, we find systematic difference...

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