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The Family Exchanges Study Wave 1 (FESI) was conducted in 2008 by the Institute for Survey Research at Temple University. The original 634 "target" or core sample was recruited from African American and White respondents aged 40-60 living in Philadelphia and the surrounding counties--Bucks, Chester, Delaware, and Montgomery. To be eligible for the study, respondents had to have at least one living parent and one living offspring over 18 years of age. Temple University sought to recruit the parents, spouse, and up to three offspring over 18 years of age into the study. All target, parent, and spouse surveys were conducted by telephone. Offspring were given the option of completing the survey by telephone or web. A total of 337 parents, 511 offspring (with another 80 by web and 1 listed as other for a total of 592), and 197 spouses were successfully recruited into the first wave of the study.

This collection includes four data files, one for each type of participant: target, spouse, parent, and offspring. For each of these participants, there are data related to relationships with other family members, perceptions of family members, and views on key social issues. Demographic information includes gender, marital status, education level, religion, age, race, ethnicity, and employment status.

The Family Exchanges Study (FESI) began in 2008 conducted by the Institute for Survey Research at Temple University. The original "target" or core sample was recruited from African American and White respondents aged 40-60 living in Philadelphia and the surrounding counties--Bucks, Chester, Delaware, and Montgomery. To be eligible for the study, respondents had to have at least one living parent and one living offspring over 18 years of age. Temple University sought to recruit the parents, spouse, and up to three offspring over 18 years of age into the study. All target, parent, and spouse surveys were conducted by telephone. Offspring were given the option of completing the survey by telephone or web.

For the Wave 2 data collection, the Survey Research Center at Pennsylvania State University attempted to contact all FESI respondents again, as well as collect updated information for spouses/romantic partners, parents, and up to 4 age-eligible offspring. The survey instruments were drawn largely from the first wave of data collection. This collection includes eight data files. These data files include five main study datasets: target, spouse, spouse without target, parent, and offspring. This collection also includes three diary datasets: target diary, parent diary, offspring diary. For each participant, there are data related to relationships with other family members, perceptions of family members, and views on key social issues. Demographic information includes gender, marital status, education level, religion, age, race, ethnicity, and employment status.

This survey of adult management tasks began in 1995 as part of a larger national project (MIDUS) to investigate the patterns, predictors, and consequences of midlife development in the areas of physical health, psychological well-being, and social responsibility. Conducted in Boston, the survey was designed to examine how adults manage tasks in three domains of life -- work, family, and health. Further goals were to describe the subjective experience of goal attainment in midlife and to link it with objective measures of short-term longitudinal changes and cognitive functioning. During the national study, the Boston area was intentionally oversampled in order to create a subset to be used for in-depth study of management processes in midlife.

The Boston study began six months after the national study, and consisted of three interviews: a 30-minute phone interview followed by a 20-minute mail questionnaire (Time 1), a 90-minute in-person combination of cognitive tests, cortisol testing, photograph taking, and interview (Time 2), and a 30-minute phone interview (Time 3), conducted at six-month intervals. The focus was on projects related to family, work, and health that participants were working on during the period of the study. Each successive interview investigated participants' assessments of their progress in the present, recollection of six months in the past, and prediction six months into the future. Two waves of data collection were completed for this study. There were 151 respondents who participated in the first wave, 151 respondents who participated in both waves, and 26 additional respondents who participated in the second wave of data collection.

At Time 1, participants generated a list of two important family, work, and health tasks, then chose one of each as the most important in that domain. For each of the most important tasks, questions were asked about deadlines, whether participants were doing tasks because they had to do them, felt that they should do them, or chose to do them, and whether participants were doing tasks for themselves, others, or both. All six projects were ranked according to importance, and participants divided all their time into percentages spent on family, work, and health. The majority of questions on the mail questionnaire at Time 1 were taken from the Midlife Development Inventory (MIDI), the instrument created for the national study.

Respondents were asked to rate their control over health, to make assessments about present, past, and future health, to list any serious illnesses, and to indicate their physical health status. Study participants also rated their mental health, and discussed stressful life events in the last six months for self, spouse/significant other, parents, and children. Other questions focused on depression, mastery and constraints, community involvement, family, work, and life satisfaction. Scales used included the Ryff Well-Being Scales, the Eysenck Personality Inventory, the Staudinger and Baltes Wisdom Scale (1995), and the Ways of Coping Scale.

Time 2 was done in-person, and included a 50-minute series of cognitive tests followed by a 40-minute interview. The cognitive testing consisted of nine measures of cognitive ability completed in the following order: WAIS Forward Digit Span, WAIS Backward Digit Span, WAIS Vocabulary, counting backwards test, letter comparison test, dual-task test involving the counting backwards and letter comparison tests, WAIS Digit Symbol, Schaie-Thurston Letter Series, and Raven's Advanced Progressive Ma Matrices.

The Time 2 interview began with a series of questions asking about each of the family, work, and health tasks elicited from the participants in Time 1. Many questions were repeated from the MIDI including rating physical health, family life, work situation, and life overall, rating physical and mental health from poor to excellent, and a measure of stressful life events in the last six months for self, spouse/significant other, parents, and children. Participants were asked to rate how old they felt and how old they looked and to indicate their total yearly household income. Lastly, a series of open-ended questions asked about best and worst aspects of family, work, and health, how participants managed their daily life, the most challenging aspect of life and how it was managed, and what participants found most helpful in carrying out their daily life. Photographs were taken of participants at the conclusion of the interview.

Time 3 asked again about each of the most important family, work, and health tasks elicited from the participants in Time 1. Newly developed questions asked participants about ideas related to middle age, including when the participant believed middle age begins and ends, whether the participant was younger than, in, or older than middle age, the biggest changes in middle age, the best and worst aspects of middle age, whether the participant knew anyone who had had a "midlife crisis," and whether he or she would have or had had a midlife crisis. Participants were asked to rate how often they had problems and how often things went well with respect to a list of 26 domains, and how much stress and how much control they had in these domains. Lastly, participants were asked whether they had ever returned to a degree-oriented educational program after being out of school for five or more years, whether they were presently taking classes to further their education, and whether being a participant in the study had influenced the ways they thought about their family, work, and health projects.

The MIDUS Refresher Daily Diary Project (aka National Study of Daily Experiences or NSDE) contains data from 782 respondents. The purpose of the Daily Stress Project was to examine how sociodemographic factors, health status, personality characteristics, and genetic endowment modify patterns of change in exposure to day-to-day life stressors as well as physical and emotional reactivity to these stressors.

The primary aims were:

1. To describe how the links between multiple aspects of daily stressors (e.g., frequency, content, severity) and daily physical and emotional well-being change over ten years during adulthood;
2. To examine how sociodemographic factors and personality characteristics influence change in both exposure to as well as changes in physical and emotional reactivity to daily stressors;
3. To investigate how exposure and reactivity to daily stressors correlate with physiological indicators of physical health and predict changes in global health reports; and
4. To explore the relative genetic and environmental influences mediating change in exposure and physical and emotional reactivity to daily stressors throughout adulthood.

The Daily Diary study is comprised of a subsample of the MIDUS (Midlife in the United States) Refresher, a national survey of nearly 3,600 Americans (aged 25 to 75) conducted during 2011-2014. The MIDUS Refresher survey was designed to replenish the original MIDUS 1 baseline cohort and allow the examination of period effects on health (mental and physical) related to the economic recession by comparing the pre-recession MIDUS 1 sample with the post-recession MIDUS Refresher sample. Guiding hypotheses, at the most general level, were that behavioral and psychosocial factors are consequential for health (physical and mental).

Demographic variables in this collection include sex and age.

The PSID is the world's longest-running nationally representative household panel survey. With over 50 years of data on the same families and their descendants, the PSID is a cornerstone of the data infrastructure for empirically based social science research in the U.S. PSID gathers data on the family as a whole and on individuals residing within the family, emphasizing the dynamic and interactive aspects of family economics, demography, and health. PSID data were collected annually from 1968-1997 and biennially after 1997.

In the Main Interview, one person per family is interviewed on a regular basis. Information about each family member is collected, but much greater detail is obtained about the reference person and, if married/cohabitating, the spouse or long-term cohabitor. Survey content changes to reflect evolving scientific and policy priorities, although many content areas have been consistently measured since 1968. Information includes employment, income, wealth, expenditures, time use, health, dementia screener, insurance, education, marriage, childbearing, philanthropy, and numerous other topics. Additional types of PSID data are available only under a restricted contract. These include but are not limited to: geospatial data below the level of state; mortality data; Medicare claims; and educational characteristics from the National Center for Education Statistics.

With low attrition and high success in following young adults as they form their own families, the sample size has grown from roughly 5,000 families in 1968 to more than 9,000 families and 24,000 individuals by 2021. Over the course of the study, the PSID has distributed data on more than 84,000 individuals. The long panel, genealogical design, and broad content of the data offer unique opportunities to conduct generational and life-course research.

The PSID now contains thousands of inter- and intragenerational relationships over 50 years of data, including (as of the 2021 wave):

• "Paired" generational relationships, with each family in the pair providing independent interviews
  • Parent-Adult Child pairs: ~4,300
  • Sibling pairs: ~5,200
  • Cousin pairs: ~5,400
• "Tripled" generational relationships, with all three generations providing independent interviews
  • Grandparent-Parent-Adult Child triplets: ~1,000

For information about earlier data collections, see Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID): Main Interview, 1968-2015.

In 2021, the main interview was updated to include questions about the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, including: loss of earnings, US government stimulus payments, charitable giving, participants' exposure to COVID-19, and vaccination status.