The Beginning School Study (BSS) has been monitoring the educational progress and life experiences of a large (N = 790) representative panel of Baltimore youth since fall 1982, when the participating children were starting first grade in 20 city public schools. Twenty-two years later the BSS is returning to the field for another interview cycle (the Mature Adult Survey, or MAS), targeted at age 27- 28. The MAS adds onto information obtained previously, including most recently a 1998/99 survey (the Young Adult Survey, or YAS), approximately four years after the group's expected high school graduation in spring 1994. Fieldwork for the MAS began in September 2004. A three agency funding partnership (the NSF, the Grant Foundation, and the Spencer Foundation) is supporting the MAS preparation and deposit of BSS data with the Harvard University Murray Research Center as a data resource. The MAS interviewing is scheduled to conclude June 2005. This award supports substantive analyses of the new MAS data, analyzing educational and occupational well being in adulthood in relation to home, school, and neighborhood formative experiences over the elementary school years, themes have a strong foundation in BSS studies to date.
The project has significant broader impacts for social science data infrastructure. It is an important longitudinal study that is producing both strong research and a rich resource for other scholars. These data are already being archived at the Murray Center at Harvard University, making them available to the wider scholarly community.
