Project Summary

This project will continue the collection of data on children in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) that is currently funded under NICHD Grant R01HD52646. The existing grant supported the PSID Child Development Supplement (CDS), which followed a cohort of children in PSID families who were 0 to 12 years of age in 1997 through three waves of data collection, focusing on understanding the socio-demographic, psychological, and economic aspects of childhood. By 2014, all of the children in the original cohort will have reached adulthood, and a new generation of children will have replaced them in PSID families. This project will collect information in 2014 on all children aged 0 to 17 years in this new generation, shifting the orientation from a cohort study to one that obtains information on the childhood experiences of all children in PSID families - children who will become primary respondents in the Core PSID when they form their own economically independent households.

These new data will support studies of health, development, and well-being in childhood; the relationship between children's characteristics and contemporaneous family decision making and behavior; and the effects of childhood factors on subsequent social, demographic, economic, and health outcomes over the entire lifecourse.