Children of the NLSY79: a unique data resource

Lawrence L. Wu is professor and chair, and Jui-Chung Allen Li is a Ph.D. candidate, in the Department of Sociology at New York University. E-mail: [email protected] Aremarkable design aspect of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) is the availability of longitudinal data on all children born to women in the original NLSY79 sample. The resulting data from the Children of the NLSY79 provide a resource that is unique in many respects. Perhaps not surprisingly, these data have been used by researchers across a wide range of disciplines, including child development, demography, economics, epidemiology, family studies, social policy, and sociology. Much of the usefulness of these data stem from two key factors: they can be linked to the rich longitudinal data for the NLSY79 mothers, and the child and young adult surveys are themselves longitudinal, covering a wide range of ages from early childhood and adolescence through the young adult years.