Session: Public Secondary Data Analyses: NLSY (Society for Social Work and Research 15th Annual Conference: Emerging Horizons for Social Work Research)

The National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth (NLSY) 1979 and 1997 Cohorts are exceptional micro-data sets for understanding a range of human behavior, including employment, schooling, family formation, physical health, migration, household composition, criminal activity, substance use, income, assets and participation in government programs. The NLSY data are extraordinarily rich and there are many tools available to help researchers make sense of the data. Even so, getting to know a new data set can be a time-consuming and intimidating process. This session is intended to provide enough information about the NLSY, so that researchers can understand when the NLSY data might be useful for a particular research question and do some preliminary investigations to look for potentially useful variables. If there were interest, we could also discuss common statistical and programming issues encountered by researchers using the NLSY data. By the end of the workshop, researchers will be familiar with: 1) the design of the NLSY, 2) the overall content of the surveys of two cohorts, 3) how to use various online resources, including the NLSY Investigator variable search and extraction tool, and 4) understand the most common types of data structures in the NLSY data sets.