The objective of the proposed project is support of key staff to complete incorporating into a single well-indexed and accurately described archive the data derived from three of the longest-term, most intensive longitudinal studies of human development ever conducted, the Berkeley Guidance Study, the Berkeley Growth Study, and the Oakland Growth Study. These studies, begun in the late 1920s and early 1930s and continued to date, have produced detailed records of the physical, mental, social and emotional development of the study member over most of the life span. The study members originally constituted reasonably representative samples of two cohorts of men and women who, as children, resided in the Bay Area of California in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The 283 study members who participated in the most recent intensive follow-up are estimated to constitute at least three-fourths of the survivors of the group carried to adolescence. More limited longitudinal data are available on parents, spouses, and a subsample of offspring. In the past three years, substantial progress has been made toward incorporating in a set of master tapes all of the most valuable data files. A team consisting of the archivist, the Institute's Assistant Director for Longitudinal Research, and a committee of senior investigators will work both to assess the additional files for inclusion, to provide more adequate documentation, and to work toward making the archive maximally accessible to others. The completion of archiving depends most crucially on a highly skilled archivist who has been reorganizing the file over the last three years. However, University budget cuts have eliminated her salary, and hence external support is critically needed. Access to the archive is available to qualified investigators and has been widely used. The conversion of additional data sets, and most important, more adequate documentation of sources, reliability, and previous uses of the data as well as correction of errors in some data sets requires two additional years of support for the current archivist. Several ongoing research projects requiring use of the archive but no additional funding are briefly described, as are two projects for which new proposals to utilize the archive are being submitted.
