National Child Development Study: Sweep 8, 2008-2009: Imagine You are 60

UKDA study number:6978

Series Title

National Child Development Study

Principal Investigator

University of London. Institute of Education. Centre for Longitudinal Studies

Sponsor

Economic and Social Research Council

Distributed by

UK Data Archive, University of Essex, Colchester.

June 2012

Bibliographic Citation

All works which use or refer to these materials should acknowledge these sources by means of bibliographic citation. To ensure that such source attributions are captured for bibliographic indexes, citations must appear in footnotes or in the reference section of publications. The bibliographic citation for this data collection is:

University of London. Institute of Education. Centre for Longitudinal Studies, National Child Development Study: Sweep 8, 2008-2009: Imagine You are 60 [computer file]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Archive [distributor], June 2012. SN: 6978 , http://dx.doi.org/10.5255/UKDA-SN-6978-1

Acknowledgement

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Copyright:
Centre for Longitudinal Studies

Disclaimer

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6978 . National Child Development Study: Sweep 8, 2008-2009: Imagine You are 60
(NCDS8)

Series:

National Child Development Study

Depositor:

University of London. Institute of Education. Centre for Longitudinal Studies

Principal Investigator:

University of London. Institute of Education. Centre for Longitudinal Studies

Sponsor:

Economic and Social Research Council

Other Acknowledgements:

The Centre for Longitudinal Studies would like to thank all the cohort members who generously gave their time to participate in this project and without whom this survey would not have been possible.

Abstract:

The core aims of the NCDS 2008-2009 study (NCDS8) were to update the life history information collected in previous NCDS waves and to collect new information to help understand the ageing process. The main NCDS8 data are held under SN 6137.

In addition, an open-ended question was asked at the end of the paper self-completion questionnaire fielded in NCDS8: "Imagine that you are now 60 years old... please write a few lines about the life you are leading (your interests, your home life, your health and well-being and any work you may be doing)." This question parallels another asked of the cohort members at NCDS2 when they were 11 years old, who then wrote about their imagined life at age 25 (see under SN 5790). The question could potentially be used as a way to code for cohort members' pessimism or optimism about the future, and the extent to which they are planning for the future. It could also be of methodological use and inform the design of future sweeps by providing evidence of some of the key concerns of cohort members at this point in the life course. Asking a question such as this on a longitudinal study will, in subsequent sweeps of the study, potentially allow comparisons to be made between actual circumstances at this future point and the future as imagined at the age of 50. Of the cohort members participating in NCDS8, some 7,383 provided responses to the question. For further details, see the User Guide within the documentation (see table below).

Further information about the full NCDS series can be found on the Centre for Longitudinal Studies website.

Main Topics:

These responses have been transcribed and anonymised, and are held within a text file. They may be analysed alongside wordcount and respondent demographic charactistics contained in the accompanying quantitative file. For further details, see the User Guide within the documentation (see table below).

Coverage:

Dates of Fieldwork: August 2008 - March 2009
Country: Great Britain
Spatial Units: Government Office Regions (GORs)
Observation Units: Individuals; Families/households
Kind of Data: Textual data; Numeric data; Individual (micro) level

Universe Sampled:

Location of Units of Observation: National
Population: Adults in Great Britain born in one particular week in 1958 (NCDS respondents were aged 50 at the time of NCDS8).

Methodology:

Time Dimensions: Longitudinal/panel/cohort
Sampling Procedures: No sampling (total universe)
Number of Units: 9,790 cohort members participated in NCDS8. Of these, 7,383 responsed to the open-ended question. Data for all 9,790 participants are included in the files, and therefore the 2,407 cases that did not complete the open-ended question have blank lines in the text file.
Method of Data Collection: Self-completion
Weighting: No weighting used for question responses. See main NCDS8 study for details of weighting.

Language(s) of Written Materials:

Study Description: English
Study Documentation: English

Access:

Access Conditions: The depositor has specified that registration is required and standard conditions of use apply. The depositor may be informed about usage.
Additional special conditions of use also apply. See terms and conditions of access for further information.
Availability: UK Data Service
Contact: Get in touch

Date of First Release:

18 June 2012

Copyright:

Centre for Longitudinal Studies

File last updated:

8 April 2013