British Household Panel Survey Combined Work-Life History Data, 1990-1999 (M863)

Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner. The British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) collects extensive information on respondents' labour market status at three points: at the time of interview at each wave of the panel; throughout the period between 1 September a year before the interview date; and retrospectively from when the respondent first left full-time education. Because the retrospective information has been 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 in 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 better facilitate such use, a set of 'reconciled' files, the British Household Panel Survey Combined Work-Life History Data, has been created, constituting single continuous records each containing all the information of a particular type in a single location. The first part of the exercise is to take 'current status' information for each wave and combine it with the inter-wave history, and then to combine the waves thus creating a continuous record from September 1990 to the latest wave. The second stage is to take the lifetime employment status history collected at Wave 2, and the lifetime 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 the labour market entry to the latest wave. The third stage is to combine these two extended lifetime histories into a single record which contains both employment status information (with good information about non-employed spells) and occupational information (i.e. details about the job held during each employed spell). Further details of the methods used are included in the following technical paper: Halpin, B. (1997) Unified BHPS work-life histories: combining multiple sources into a user-friendly format, Technical Papers of the ESRC Research Centre on Micro-Social Change, 13, Colchester: University of Essex. Users are recommended to use these data in conjunction with the main BHPS dataset. It should also be noted that this dataset is in package format; see READ file for further details on formats and use.