We propose to continue the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS) with a major round of data collection, 45 years after the high school graduation of the original 10,317 participants. We want to exploit the unique scientific value of the WLS to pursue a broad agenda of research on social and economic factors in health and aging. We represent diverse scientific fields - sociology, demography, epidemiology, economics, social and cognitive psychology, industrial engineering, neuroscience, social work, psychiatry, nursing, and medicine. Our plan for data collection - of which these proposed surveys are only the first phase - will span many modes: telephone and mail surveys, brain imaging, personal interview, anthropometric measurement, bio-indicators, content analysis of recorded interviews, and linked administrative records. We intend and expect that these new data, along with the rich data presently available from the WLS, will resolve old questions and open new areas of interdisciplinary inquiry about health, aging, and the life course. All WLS data will be released to the research community as soon as they have been collected, cleaned, and documented. We propose one-hour telephone and 48 page mail surveys in 2002-03 of more than 9600 surviving American men and women who were first interviewed as graduating seniors in high school in 1957 and were followed up in 1964, 1975, and 1992; they will be 63-64 years old when they are surveyed. (b) We propose parallel telephone and mail surveys of 7150 randomly selected siblings of the graduates; they vary widely in age and most were first surveyed in 1994; about 2100 were first interviewed in 1977. (c) We propose shorter (30 minute) telephone interviews with spouses (N = 10,150) and widows of graduates and their siblings (N = 850). The WLS is unique as a large scale longitudinal study of adults and their families that will soon cover almost half a century. It is a valuable public resource for studies of aging and the life course, inter-generational transfers and relationships, family functioning, long-term effects of education and of cognitive ability, occupational careers, physical and mental well-being, and morbidity and mortality. Our goal is to extend and enrich our observations of the WLS cohort since their adolescence in ways that will answer important research questions in aging for decades to come.
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