ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: A history of household panel studies (1966-97)
Author: Edwards José
The US Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) originated in 1968 as an instrument for evaluating the effects of President Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty”. Hosted at the Institute for Social Research of the University of Michigan, it eventually became one of the most widely used longitudinal datasets by economists, sociologists and social psychologists worldwide (1). The PSID has also influenced the development of new household panel studies, like the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS). The academic centers involved in the production of such studies aim at producing data as it is done in the natural sciences, and are currently engaged in cooperative research for creating networks comparable to “the large-scale telescopes and accelerators shared by astronomers and physicists around the world” (2). The proposed paper aims at writing a history of the emergence and development of these “social telescopes”. It does so by exploring the history of the PSID: since its inception in 1966 at the US Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), and throughout its transformation into an academic resource towards 1997. It proceeds by characterizing three different time periods: (1) “Origins: 1966-1972”, (2) “The Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) period”: 1973-1981, and (3) “Towards NSF funding — representativeness, recontacts and new household survey projects: 1982-1997”. It concludes that it was during the last of these three periods that the PSID developed into an academic resource. That same period saw the emergence of household panel studies in Europe, like the SOEP and the GSOEP, a brief discussion of which is also included in the manuscript. (1) J. House, T. Juster, R. Kahn, H. Schuman and E. Singer (eds.) (2004), A Telescope on Society: Survey Research & Social Science at the University of Michigan & Beyond, The University of Michigan Press. (2) G. Wagner, J. Frick, and J. Schupp (2007), “The German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) — Scope, Evolution and Enhancements”, Schmollers Jahrbuch, Vol. 127, No. 1, pp. 139-169.
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