Cross-national harmonisation

Many of the UK's major longitudinal studies are - broadly and with caveats attached - equivalent to surveys in other countries. Even where they are not broadly equivalent, particular survey questions/modules may be comparable with questions/modules asked in other national and international surveys.

Ideally, this equivalence is by design (ex-ante harmonisation). Where it is not by design, it can be the product of efforts made after the data were collected (ex-post harmonisation).

This page lists a number of key, cross-national, longitudinal data harmonisation projects (mostly ex-post) and points users in the direction of data and resources created by these projects.

Birth cohort study harmonisation data/resources

• Young Lives: an International Study of Childhood Poverty | Young Lives is a birth cohort study (ex-ante harmonisation) with a focus on measuring childhood poverty across four countries: Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam.

Socio-economic/multi-purpose panel harmonisation data/resources

• Cornell University User Package for the Cross-National Equivalent File (CNEF), 1980-2008 | The CNEF contains equivalently defined variables for the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), the British Household Panel Study (BHPS), the Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA), the Korea Labor and Income Panel Study (KLIPS), the Swiss Household Panel (SHP), and the Canadian Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics (SLID).
• European Community Household Panel (ECHP) | The ECHP ran from 1994-2001, collecting data annually on income, living conditions, housing, health and work in the EU. The BHPS provided the UK component of the panel.
• European Union Survey of Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) | The successor to the ECHP, the EU-SILC contains cross-sectional and longitudinal design elements. The UK's General Household Survey has made significant adaptations to provide the UK component of the panel.

Longitudinal study of ageing harmonisation data/resources

• Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) | SHARE is a cross-national longitudinal study of ageing, covering respondents aged 50+ in 18 European countries. Whilst the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA) is not formally part of SHARE, both projects have maintained comparability through harmonisation. Note: Registered ESDS users may request access to the ELSA portion of the data from a project to harmonise ELSA Wave 2 and SHARE Wave 1 (both 2004) data undertaken by Valeria Bordon at the University of Mannheim. Contact longitudinal@esds.ac.uk for further details. The SHARE portion of this joint database can be accessed via CentERdata.

General cross-national harmonisation data/resources

• Cross-Cultural Survey Guidelines: XII: Harmonization of Survey and Statistical Data | The Cross-Cultural Survey Guidelines is an online resource describing best practice in the collection of survey data across countries for a single project.
• CESSDA PPP: WP9: Building an infrastructure for content harmonisation and conversion | Work Package 9 of the CESSDA PPP focuses on specifying two harmonisation information systems: a Constructs, Classifications, Conversions DataBase (CCCDB) and a Question DataBase (QDB).
• ESDS International: Cross-national methods: Equivalence, harmonisation | A set of links to online resources.