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  • How to work with longitudinal data

    Hello everyone, I am working on longitudinal data from the labour force survey, the UK. I am working on the labour market transitions. The UK labour force survey data is a five quarter data, i mean there are four files for a year and we get ten year data. now as a first step, I want to work on descriptive statistics, I request you for help, that what should be the first step? should i append data in four files for every year and then do the same for ten years and after that i should merge all ten years file? I mean how to combine the quarters and how to combine the years? Thank you.

  • #2
    In the simplest case, if the surveys ask the same questions (or nearly all the same questions) in every quarter, and assuming that each respondent has a unique id number that is included as a variable in each survey, and that id number does not change over time, then probably the most effective way to proceed is to append all of the data sets together.

    If, however, each quarter's survey asks (mostly) different questions, and then the cycle of those questions is repeated each year, I would -merge- each year's quarters together, and then append the resulting yearly data sets to each other.

    I'm confused when you say that the survey is five-quarter data and then later say that there are four files a year and ten years. With four files a year and ten years that is a 40 quarter survey, no? So I'm wondering what you had in mind when you referred to it as five-quarter data: that might have a bearing on the best way to organize it.

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