Code to Create a Combined British Household Panel Survey and Understanding Society Data File, 1991-2020

The Modelling Housing Career Trajectories in Great Britain project used a range of datasets to examine how people’s pathways through the British housing system have changed since the 1990s. The project made extensive use of secondary household panel survey data from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS, 1991-2008) and its successor, Understanding Society (UKHLS, 2009-present). This collection consists of project R code written to (1) extract and then (2) combine data from across the various files of BHPS and UKHLS into one ‘master’ longitudinal dataset containing annual records for all observed individuals from 1991 to 2020. A number of key individual and household-level variables (including age, sex, country of birth, partnership status, highest educational qualification, employment status, incomes and region) are then (3) cleaned and harmonised. Users can download and adapt the deposited code as needed for their own social science applications.