A conference will be held in Washington, D.C. in the summer of 1988 to help guide the future of a highly influential, widely used data series known as the National Longitudinal Surveys of Labor Market Experience (NLS). The conference will bring together leading academic researchers from the fields of economics, demography, and sociology, high-level administrators from federal agencies which support the NLS, and key staff from the three organizations which share operational responsibility for the NLS to discuss issues of substance and methodology which have arisen due to existing and predicted resource constraints. Among the contemplated outcomes of the conference are the dissemination of scientific papers assessing the tradeoffs involved in maintaining vs. discontinuing particular components of the series, vitally needed additions to the series for providing information on changing economic and social problems, and the establishment of priorities for satisfying different research objectives. The conference is timely in its emphasis on reassessment as well as reaffirmation of the value of the NLS both to social science and to public decision making.
