We propose to continue the collection and distribution of data on children in PSID-CDS families who are making the transition from adolescence into early adulthood in a multiwave study, """"""""Transition into Adulthood (TA)."""""""" Specifically, we seek support for two additional waves of TA to be collected in 2009 and 2011 from the children of the Child Development Supplement cohort who have turned age 18 by this time. This will yield a combined CDS-TA sub-panel of the PSID with seven waves of information from early childhood to young adulthood on this cohort of 3,653 children age 0-12 in the initial (1997) wave of CDS. We also seek support for the conduct of outreach to the research community in order to increase awareness and facilitate the use of these data in a multi-disciplinary context. Over the last 30 years in the U.S. we have seen a dramatic increase in the age span of what can be called transition to adulthood in the domains of education, work, economic independence, marriage/cohabitation, and parenthood. All of this is occurring over a widely variable age interval and on average, a longer one. Like the British Household Panel Survey, and other genealogical panels, TA-CDS provides extensive information on the ways in which youth, from early teenage years on, make their way through the educational, occupational, and relationship transitions that mark the transition to adulthood in developed countries. All the CDS/TA data can be connected, via our on-line Data Center, to the experiences of the parents and grandparents and siblings at comparable life course stages. With prior support from NICHD, three waves of data have already been collected on these youth from PSID families in the CDS, in 1997 (CDS-I) at age 0-12, again in 2002/03 (CDS-II) at age 5-18, and again in 2007/08 (CDS-III) for those at age 10-18. In addition, the first two waves of the TA study have been successfully implemented. TA 2005 collected interviews from 745 youth who turned age18 and graduated or left high school as of 2005 for an 89 percent response rate. The second wave of TA concluded in March 2008, collecting interviews from these same youth plus those who turned 18 and graduated or left high school as of 2007, for a total of 1,118 interviews and a 90 percent response rate. We plan to collect TA data for all CDS children as they make the transition into the main PSID sample. Those few CDS youth who have already made this transition will also receive the same material as the dependent TA sample still living at home. The TA content is extensive and covers material which must be reported directly. The TA sample sizes increase over time as the number of CDS 'alumni'over age 18 grows, with about 1,891 eligible in 2009 and another 1,962 in 2011, boosting sample power.
The years between 18 and 25-28 years of age have become a period of life in which youth are no longer adolescents but not yet adults. We currently know almost nothing about the personal and social characteristics that either facilitate or impede the successful passage through this period into a productive adulthood. Collecting TA data in 2009 and 2011 will add to the new PSID-CDS-TA combined data resource, presenting a unique opportunity for an interdisciplinary scientific community to examine the role of various familial and behavioral factors on successful early life course trajectories in particularly innovative and informative ways.
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