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The Americans' Changing Lives (ACL) survey series is an ongoing, nationally representative, longitudinal study focusing especially on differences between Black and White Americans in middle and late life. These data constitute the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth waves in a panel survey covering a wide range of sociological, psychological, mental, and physical health items. Wave I of the study began in 1986 with a nation face-to-face survey of 3,617 adults ages 25 and up, with Black Americans and people aged 60 and over over-sampled at twice the rate of the others. Wave II constitutes face-to-face re-interviews in 1989 of those still alive. Survivors have been re-interviewed by telephone, and when necessary face-to-face, in 1994 (Wave III), 2001/02 (Wave IV), 2011 (Wave V), and 2019/21 (Wave VI).

Please note that for Wave VI, the majority of data collection occurred in 2019, with only a small subset (n=39) of participants surveyed in 2021.

ACL was designed and sought to investigate the following: (1) The ways in which a wide range of activities and social relationships that people engage in are broadly "productive," (2) how individuals adapt to acute life events and chronic stresses that threaten the maintenance of health, effective functioning, and productive activity, and (3) sociocultural variations in the nature, meaning, determinants, and consequences of productive activity and relationships. Among the topics covered are interpersonal relationships (spouse/partner, children, parents, friends), sources and levels of satisfaction, social interactions and leisure activities, traumatic life events (physical assault, serious illness, divorce, death of a loved one, financial or legal problems), perceptions of retirement, health behaviors (smoking, alcohol consumption, overweight, rest), and utilization of health care services (doctor visits, hospitalization, nursing home institutionalization, bed days). Also included are measures of physical health, psychological well-being, and indices referring to cognitive functioning.

Demographic information provided for individuals includes household composition, number of children and grandchildren, employment status, occupation and work history, income, family financial situation, religious beliefs and practices, ethnicity, race, education, sex, and region of residence.

The College and Beyond II (CBII) Alumni Survey Open Response Study contains two open-response variables extracted from the CBII Alumni Survey. The 'essay' variable details an important undergraduate experience described by the respondent and ways it has contributed to the respondent's life today. The 'final' variable contains any other information the respondent wanted to write about. The Open Response Study data can be linked with other CBII student-level data using the id_person variable.

Content warning: Users should be aware that some responses cover sensitive topics such as experiences of discrimination, sexual assault, suicidal ideation, and substance misuse. Respondents' experiences of discrimination include incidents of hate speech and the use of racial slurs. ICPSR has chosen to preserve the data as it was collected, without masking these words, and is not condoning their use.

The College and Beyond II (CBII) Student Experience Analytics Study contains contextual analytics of students' undergraduate experience based solely on information extracted from the Administrative Data. The study consists of two sets of derived measures, the Transcript of the Future measures and the Course Diversity measures. They are provided as examples of the types of aggregate measures that can be distilled from transcript data. Users are encouraged to explore their potential for measuring the student experience. Code similar to that used to generate the Transcript of the Future measures can be found here on Github.

The following Student Experience Analytics variables were developed by Koester et al. (2017): transcript_student_effect, transcript_course_effect, transcript_breadth, and transcript_div_major. If you use them in your work, please cite the following:

Koester, B.P., Fogel, J., Murdock III, W., Grom, G., & McKay, T.A. (2017). Building a transcript of the future. In Proceedings of the Seventh International Analytics & Knowledge Conference (pp. 209-308).

In 1995-1996, the MacArthur Midlife Research Network carried out a national survey of over 7,000 Americans aged 25 to 74 [ICPSR 2760]. The purpose of the study was to investigate the role of behavioral, psychological, and social factors in understanding age-related differences in physical and mental health. The study was innovative for its broad scientific scope, its diverse samples (which included siblings of the main sample respondents and a national sample of twin pairs), and its creative use of in-depth assessments in key areas (e.g. daily diary of stressful experiences [ICPSR 3725] and cognitive functioning [ICPSR 3596]) on a subset of participants. A detailed description of the study and findings generated by it are available at: http://www.midus.wisc.edu

With support from the National Institute on Aging, a follow-up of the original Midlife Development in the United States (MIDUS) sample was conducted in 2004 (MIDUS 2 [ICPSR 4652]). The daily stress and cognitive functioning projects were repeated and expanded at MIDUS 2; in addition the protocol was expanded to include biomarkers and neuroscience.

In 2013 a third wave (MIDUS 3) of survey data was collected on longitudinal participants. Data collection for this follow-up wave largely repeated baseline assessments (e.g., phone interview and extensive self-administered questionnaire), with additional questions in selected areas such as economic recession experiences. Cognitive functioning data were also collected at the same time, while data collection for the daily diary, biomarker, and neuroscience projects commenced in 2017.

MIDUS also maintains a Colectica portal, which allows users to interact with variables across waves and create customized subsets. Registration is required.