In the spotlight - the growth of ESDS Longitudinal

Article dated: 9 October 2007

At the outset of ESDS in January 2003, ESDS Longitudinal supported three major studies: the British Household Panel Survey and two birth cohort studies - the National Child Development Study (the 1958 birth cohort) and the 1970 British Cohort Study. The fledgling service was charged with:

• creating sampler files to facilitate the exploration of the content of the data
• providing access to enhanced documentation, and tools for data subsetting and matching
• providing users with methodological resource aids
• allowing researchers to make use of restricted data, especially geo-coded data, where this can be done without prejudicing the confidentiality of survey respondents
• encouraging links with other datasets not directly supported by ESDS and identifying other longitudinal data collections suitable for inclusion

Nearly five years on and each of these targets has been realised.

Taking the targets in reverse order, ESDS Longitudinal has added three major new studies to its portfolio:

• Millennium Cohort Study (the latest national birth cohort)
• English Longitudinal Study of Ageing
• Longitudinal Study of Young People in England

A fourth, established study - the Families and Children Study - was added to the major studies pages in September 2007.

The service has also sought to improve the visibility of small- and medium-sized longitudinal studies available via ESDS and to provide links to longitudinal data held elsewhere.

Users wishing to analyse longitudinal data at fine geographical levels have benefited from the availability of Special Licence data for the birth cohort studies and from access arrangements put in place by the data creators and depositors of the other major studies. ESDS Longitudinal has provided a guide to accessing geography variables for these datasets via its resources page.

The resources page also aims to bring to users' attention other material created by the service, including introductory user guides for each of the major studies, a database of comparable indicators and a series of teaching/sampler datasets, created with new and inexperienced users in mind. These sampler datasets are made available both via the ESDS catalogue and via Nesstar, where users may browse, explore, subset and download data from the major longitudinal studies.