DOI: 10.5255/ukda-sn-7483-5
title: Young Lives: an International Study of Childhood Poverty: Rounds 1-5 Constructed Files, 2002-2016
title: Young Lives: an International Study of Childhood Poverty
title: YL

description: &lt;div&gt;The &lt;span style="font-style: italic;"&gt;Young Lives&lt;/span&gt; survey is an innovative long-term project investigating the changing nature of childhood poverty in four developing countries. The study is being conducted in Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam and has tracked the lives of 12,000 children over a 20-year period, through 5 (in-person) survey rounds (Round 1-5) and, with the latest survey round (Round 6) conducted over the phone in 2020 and 2021 as part of the &lt;span style="font-style: italic;"&gt;Listening to Young Lives at Work: COVID-19 Phone Survey&lt;/span&gt;.&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;&lt;br&gt;Round 1 of Young Lives surveyed two groups of children in each country, at 1 year old and 5 years old. Round 2 returned to the same children who were then aged 5 and 12 years old. Round 3 surveyed the same children again at aged 7-8 years and 14-15 years, Round 4 surveyed them at 12 and 19 years old, and Round 5 surveyed them at 15 and 22 years old. Thus the younger children are being tracked from infancy to their mid-teens and the older children through into adulthood, when some will become parents themselves.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;The 2020 phone survey consists of three phone calls (Call 1 administered in June-July 2020; Call 2 in August-October 2020 and Call 3 in November-December 2020) and the 2021 phone survey consists of two additional phone calls (Call 4 in August 2021 and Call 5 in October-December 2021) The calls took place with each Young Lives respondent, across both the younger and older cohort, and in all four study countries (reaching an estimated total of around 11,000 young people).&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;&lt;br&gt;The Young Lives survey is carried out by teams of local researchers, supported by the Principal Investigator and Data Manager in each country.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;Further information about the survey, including publications, can be downloaded from the &lt;a href="https://www.younglives.org.uk/" title="Young Lives" target="_blank" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"&gt;Young Lives&lt;/a&gt; website.&lt;/div&gt;
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&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Constructed Files:&lt;/b&gt;&lt;br&gt;
The &lt;i&gt;Rounds 1-5 Constructed Files, 2002-2016&lt;/i&gt; are combined sub-sets of selected variables from Rounds 1-5 of the Young Lives survey. One main constructed data file is available for each of the four countries. These are presented in a panel format and contain approximately 200 original and constructed variables, with the majority comparable across all five rounds. The Stata syntax (.do) files which have been used to create the constructed data files are also included for information.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;span style="font-style: italic;"&gt;Latest edition information:&lt;/span&gt;&lt;br&gt;For the fifth edition (September 2022), five additional datasets have been included to add recently calculated Item Response Theory (IRT) scores to create comparative scores for cognitive tests across Rounds and Cohorts in the four Young Lives countries. Cognitive and achievement measures administered and included in these datasets are the Peabody Picture of Vocabulary Test (PPVT), maths achievement and reading comprehension. For more detail on the psychometric analysis carried using IRT, please see the Technical note, Equating Cognitive Scores across Rounds and Cohorts for Young Lives in Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam, included in the study documentation.&lt;/p&gt;