Health, Wealth, and Wellbeing over the Life Course and Across Generations

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): A cornerstone of the nation's social science research infrastructure, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) is a longitudinal survey of a nationally representative sample of U.S. families. Begun in 1968, 36 waves of data have now been collected on PSID families and their descendents. Its long-term measures of economic and social wellbeing have spurred researchers and policy makers to attend to the fundamental dynamism inherent in social and behavioral processes. The PSID is increasingly being used to answer innovative social and behavioral research questions in the context of an aging society, and is the only national resource that will allow study of health and mortality in a life course and genealogic framework. This application proposes to collect, process, and disseminate three modules in the 2013 and 2015 waves of the PSID: 1. Health module: Including 15 minutes of survey questions on health status, health behaviors, health insurance coverage and health care costs. Linkages to the National Death Index and Medicare will be extended; 2. Wealth module: Including 10 minutes of survey questions on wealth, active savings, and pensions. Linkage to Social Security earnings and benefits records for active sample and decedents will be undertaken for the first time, and a new module to minimize errors in reports of wealth changes will be developed and implemented; and 3. Wellbeing module with related psychosocial measures: We will design and implement a mixed-mode (web/mail out) questionnaire to collect content from both respondents and spouses about their wellbeing and related psychosocial measures (e.g., personality, intelligence), with an experiment to identify (and allow researchers to adjust for if necessary) mode effects. After collection, the data will be processed and distributed in the PSID Online Data Center, which will allow users to create customized extracts and codebooks using a cross-year variable index. The proposed modules will make the PSID the only long-term panel representative of the full U.S. population equipped to study life course and multigenerational health, wealth and wellbeing.