Unified BHPS work-life histories: Combining multiple sources into a user-friendly format

Longitudinal data is often difficult to use, and continuous histories collected in a panel are a particularly unfriendly case. This paper reports an exercise to re-organise the British Household Panel Study's work-life history data into a format more convenient for analysis. The British Household Panel Study collects extensive labour market history information from its respondents, both during the panel period and retrospectively from labour market entry. That this information is of necessity stored in multiple locations, and of varying levels of detail, has made use somewhat inconvenient. This paper describes an exercise to bring the labour market information together in a more convenient format. It also considers some of the problems of retrospective and panel longitudinal data, and discusses issues of recall error and measurement error. The data files described are available through the UK Data Archive. Longitudinal Data, Work-Life Histories, Recall Bias, Measurement Error.