Funds are sought for critical enhancements of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) in the area of child development, health and well-being. The PSID is a longitudinal survey since 1968 of a representative sample of U.S families. It provides information on employment, income, housing, food expenditures, transfer income, charitable giving, marital and fertility behavior, wealth, pensions, and health. Because adult children of sample members are also interviewed when they move out, the PS1D allows study of the intergenerational connections of wealth, socioeconomic status, and health. The 1997 Child Development Supplement to the PSID (CDS-I), collected data on 3,563 children (u to two children per PSID family), ages 0-12. The CDS provides data on cognitive, behavioral and health status; parental time input; child's time use at home and school; resources available to the child from home, school and neighborhood. was designed to yield data that would be most fully utilized in conjunction with information about the family an parents from the PSID Core interview; parental-level measures for the children are needed in order to have a useful observation of children for the CDS sample. A conflict between PSID fiscal constraints and CDS goals was introduce in 1997 when PSID was forced to reduce its sample size. The families selected to be dropped from the core PSI] interview were from the PSID's original low-income oversample. CDS obtained funding to include about 730 families from this dropped sample group, in order to boost the CDS sample size of low-income African-American families. Separate funding was obtained in order to reinclude the 730 in the PSID core interviews in 1997 and 1999, so as to have the essential companion measures available. This proposal seeks funding to maintain these families in the core PSID sample for 2001 and 2003. CDS-II, to be fielded in 2002-03,will follow the developmental progress of the CDS-I children, who will the be age 5-17, making continued collection of PSID core data for them all the more valuable, as it will enable examination of how changes in resources and circumstances of the parents and family -- however affected by larger economic events and trends -- influence the performance and well-being of the children. The larger CDS sample size (from addition of these 730 families) will result in increased statistical precision, notably a slight improvement in standard errors for pooled sample analyses of all sample cases but large and important improvements in standard error of estimates for analyses of the low income sample of children or effects attributable to low income status. By extension, for analysis of subgroups within the low income sample the boost from the 730 is even more essential.
