UKHLS Consultation Launch, 19/06/07, RSS Initial Conditions and Life Histories Heather Laurie ISER

UKHLS Consultation Launch, 19/06/07, RSS Two areas for retrospective data Initial Conditions –Items collected once in the life of the survey –Mainly factual background measures about the respondent’s past e.g. place of birth, date moved to UK if non-British born, stock of all education qualifications, details of parental background, siblings Life History data –record all changes in a particular domain over the whole life-course to date e.g. cohabitation, marital and fertility history; an employment history; migration history; and many others

UKHLS Consultation Launch, 19/06/07, RSS Initial conditions Are some measures which will be required for all respondents to enable analysis of the wave 1 and the panel data (e.g. place of birth, stock of education qualifications or highest qualification) Other areas less clear e.g. –Sibling information (number, order, gender) –Details of parents’ level of education –Details of home-life when a child (number books etc) –Information on whether living with both parents until the age of 16 Desirable to establish a module of questions that are asked at wave 1 and then for all new entrants to the survey at later waves

UKHLS Consultation Launch, 19/06/07, RSS Life Histories Life history data important to understand lifecourse Three issues: –should these data be collected at all for a prospective panel survey? –At which wave should they be collected i.e. at wave 1 or later? –Are there some elements of the sample where having history data at wave 1 is more important or valuable for analysis? e.g. the ethnic minority boost Advantage of life history data is that it would provide immediate longitudinal (retrospective) data for a very large sample Disadvantage is the time histories take to collect well Collecting these data will necessarily reduce the amount of questionnaire space available for other topic areas.

UKHLS Consultation Launch, 19/06/07, RSS Collecting retrospective data Time-consuming to collect esp. life histories –Depends on level of detail required –Respondent may not know the answer e.g. level of parental education Recall error can be problematic –Recall less problematic for salient or significant events e.g. the birth of a child –More problematic for events such as short spells of unemployment many years ago –Needs consideration in the questionnaire design Space on the questionnaire will be under pressure Need to prioritise areas and key measures Establish if and when histories should be collected