The Panel Study of Income Dynamics

A User's Guide

Now researchers can more effectively use the abundant array of data from the annual Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) by utilizing this handy guidebook. Aimed at making this rich data set more accessible, The Panel Study of Income Dynamics describes PSID's topics, study design, research methods, and available data files. It reviews key analysis issues and identifies essential variables for the user. Several detailed analysis examples show how to make use of the PSID to estimate earnings regressions, changes in women's income following divorce, and the correlation between parents' income and a child's adult income, as well as to create a longitudinal poverty measure. This guidebook concludes by giving information on how to obtain PSID documents and the data files themselves. The Panel Study of Income Dynamics is an essential resource for all researchers--particularly those studying income, employment, family, health, wealth, and retirement. "Hill's book provides a cognet and painstaking introduction to a complex base. . . . Hill provides a comprehensive overview of the substantive content of the PSID. . . . The reader will find everything needed to make a decision concerning initial use of the PSID, including the storage size in megabytes (MB) of each available file. . . . By providing a brief yet thorough overview of this complex data set, Hill's book increases the PSID's accessibility. This book is thus a welcome addition to the new series." --Journal of the American Statistical Association "The Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). . . offers sociologists the type of detailed, longitudinal information that informs today's agenda-setting research on poverty, earnings, employment patterns, and family life-course transitions. The PSID's richness. . . derives from a complex data structure. . . . Hill's guide, the second of a Sage series intended to assist researchers in the use of major social science data bases, extends aid to both the prospective and the experienced PSID analyst. Written in direct, easy-to-read prose, this slim volume provides a concise introduction to the PSID, summarizing special features of the panel's design, content, and data-editing procedures. Readers are informed of the main subtleties involved in applying weights that correct for sample attrition and selection probabilities; though brief, Hill's treatment of this topic helps to demystify a fairly complicated set of rules. Newcomers especially stand to benefit from the description of key filtering variables one must use to exploit the longitudinal possibilities of the data and from a set of helpful summary tables. Old friends of the PSID, along with the just acquainted, will appreciate the instructive examples of cross-sectional analysis, pooled cross-section of time-series regression, and other longitudinal estimation strategies--ones that nicely illustrate certain steps involved in successfully analyzing the data. . . . Hill's handbook is a valuable resource. Researchers preparing to use this data set for the first time can now avail themselves of a compact, well-rounded digest of PSID essentials. Experienced practitioners will welcome the volume as a quick, reliable reference for many details that recurrently affect PSID date management and analysis." --Contemporary Sociology "Martha Hill has done an excellent job with this relatively brief description of an extremely complicated data set. It is clear, reads well, describes the main features and complications of the data, and provides very useful summary tables. It will be a very useful introduction to the PSID for new users at all levels of sophistication; it will also be a useful resource for experienced users, simply because it provides clear answers to the most common problems encountered when using the PSID." --Annemette Sorensen, Harvard University "Dr. Hill's monograph provides a useful overview of a major social science research data base--The Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Succinct, yet comprehensive in its coverage, the monograph will become a useful model for other large-scale social science data bases. Less detailed than technical documentation or a user guide, the monograph is a superb introduction for social scientists to the Survey Research Center's Panel Study of Income Dynamics. The monograph reviews the major issues related to the study--survey design, and content, field procedures, data preparation and data quality. The monograph discusses principal analytic issues related to the study and provides good examples of PSID data analysis for both new and experienced users of these data." --Daniel Kasprzyk, United States Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics