Children & families

Growing Up in Australia: The Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC) is a major study following the development of 10,000 children and families from all parts of Australia

The Longitudinal Surveys of Australian Youth (LSAY) is a research program that tracks young people as they move from school to post-school destinations.

Footprints in Time is the name given to the Longitudinal Study of Indigenous Children (LSIC), an initiative of the Australian Government. Footprints in Time is conducted by the Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs (FaHCSIA) under the guidance of the Footprints in Time Steering Committee, chaired by Professor Mick Dodson AM. The study aims to improve the understanding of, and policy response to, the diverse circumstances faced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, their families and communities.

Australia's first nationally representative household based panel survey. HILDA was initiated and is funded by the Australian government and is managed on behalf of the Commonwealth by the Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs (FaHCSIA). Responsibility for the design and administration of the survey rests with the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research (the Melbourne Institute) at the University of Melbourne.

Research Data Australia, the flagship service of the Australian National Data Service (ANDS), provides a comprehensive window into the Australian Research Data Commons.

This page acts as a guide to various statistical collections and publications relating to people and to communities.

Family Facts and Figures provides broad trends in Australian families. These trends are primarily based on statistics published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), though data from major Australian surveys are also used.

The American Time Use Survey Data Extract Builder (ATUS-X) is a project dedicated to making it easy for researchers to use data from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS). The ATUS is an ongoing time diary study, started in 2003, that is funded by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and fielded by the U.S. Census Bureau.

A monthly survey of approximately 50,000 households conducted by the Bureau of the Census for the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The survey has been conducted for more than 50 years. A detailed demographic supplement is conducted annually in March, and supplements on other topics, including computer use and school enrolment.

The Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS) program includes two longitudinal studies that examine child development, school readiness, and early school experiences. The birth cohort (ECLS-B) is a sample of children born in 2001 and followed from birth through kindergarten entry. The kindergarten cohort class of 1998-1999 (ECLS-K) is a sample of children followed from kindergarten through the eighth grade.

The Fragile Families & Child Wellbeing Study is following a cohort of nearly 5,000 children born in large U.S. cities between 1998 and 2000 (roughly three-quarters of whom were born to unmarried parents). We refer to unmarried parents and their children as “fragile families” to underscore that they are families and that they are at greater risk of breaking up and living in poverty than more traditional families.

HUD USER provides interested researchers with access to the original data sets generated by PD&R-sponsored data collection efforts, including the American Housing Survey, HUD median family income limits, as well as microdata from research initiatives on topics such as housing discrimination, the HUD-insured multifamily housing stock, and the public housing population.

The AECF is a non-profit organization that works on behalf of disadvantaged children and collects data on benchmarks of child well-being.

Topics well-represented in the archive include sexual orientation, gender roles and the status of women, race, and socio-economic status. Application may need to be made directly to the Murray Research Archive for permission to use the data.

NACDA,"located within ICPSR, is funded by the National Institute on Aging. NACDA's mission is to advance research on aging by helping researchers to profit from the under-exploited potential of a broad range of datasets...NACDA acquires and preserves data relevant to gerontological research, processing as needed to promote effective research use, disseminates them to researchers, and facilitates their use.

The National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect at Cornell University focuses on the field of child maltreatment. NDACAN acquires microdata from leading researchers and national data collection efforts and makes the datasets available to the research community for secondary analysis. NOTE: Application must be made directly to NDACAN for permission to use the data.

These surveys cover learning at all ages, from early childhood to school age to adulthood. Surveys include adult education (1991, 1995, 1999, 2001, 2003), early childhood program participation (1991, 1995, 1999, 2001), and parent and family involvement in education (1996, 1999, 2003) among others.

This survey provides a comprehensive look at the well-being of children and adults, identifying differences among the 13 states which have been studied in depth: Alabama, California, Colorado, Florida, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, New Jersey, New York, Texas, Washington, and Wisconsin. Sample of over 40,000 families per round.

This is a longitudinal population-based survey of families and households in the United States designed to look at the causes and consequences of changes in family and household structure. Three survey waves are available: Wave 1: 1987-1988; Wave 2: 1992-1994; Wave 3: 2001-2002. (Citation information for each wave is available on the survey's home page.)

The National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) gathers information on family life, marriage and divorce, pregnancy, infertility, use of contraception, and men's and women's health.

"A national study of socioeconomics and health over lifetimes and across generations...The study began in 1968 with a nationally representative sample of over 18,000 individuals living in 5,000 families in the United States. Information on these individuals and their descendants has been collected continuously, including data covering employment, income, wealth, expenditures, health, marriage, childbearing, child development, philanthropy, education, and numerous other topics."

The SCF is "a triennial survey of the balance sheet, pension, income, and other demographic characteristics of U.S. families. The survey also gathers information on the use of financial institutions. The links to the surveys provide summary results, codebooks and other documentation, and the publicly available data."

CURFs microdata is the most detailed level of ABS statistical data available, and is used by researchers in Universities, Government and the private sector.

American FactFinder provides access to data about the United States, Puerto Rico and the Island Areas. The data in American FactFinder come from several censuses and surveys.

From the Center for Demography for Health and Aging: "This page is designed to aid researchers in aging find cross-sectional studies, time series, contextual data, and other data relevant to their research. About 55 studies and datasets have been highlighted in order to provide easy access to some of the most well known and useful studies of the sociological, economic, and medical aspects of aging.

DSDR catalogs studies across the social science disciplines and provides SAS, SPSS, Stata, R, and ASCII files for them. Online analysis—which enables users to perform statistical procedures on a dataset without downloading it—is available for some studies. Subjects include:
* Fertility, Family Planning, Sexual Behavior, and Reproductive Health
* Health and Mortality
* Marriage, Family, Households, and Unions
* Migration and Population Distribution
* Population Characteristics
* Population Growth and Decline
* Early Life Conditions and Older Adult Health
* Children and Youth
* Childhood Obesity

Research Connections offers both research data suitable for further analysis and statistical results generated from public sources. We use the term "research data" to refer to the coded responses from each respondent, documentation that provides the original questions asked, and discussions of complex statistical methods.