While not taking my attention away from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, it is worth looking at another longitudinal study, called High School and Beyond. Like the General Social Survey, also important, this study resides at the ICPSR, which I think stands for the Inter-Universities Consortium for Political and Social Research. Currently the ICPSR is not something I am happy with, because they keep making their studies less and less available to the public. Happily I did download some years of the GSS a few years ago, along with some of High School and beyond, because they are now restricting access to those surveys to ICPSR institutions. Most annoying. They keep doing that, even with stuff that has been made public before, and do not list publicly available data until you request it, either. Most annoying. I seem to remember that the GSS and other surveys I have downloaded over the years are often in formats which are hard to read. At least the WLS makes that easy enough. They leave much documentation difficult to read, but the basics are there. I don’t know what I can find on old CD-R disks I created, but I’ll look. As long as I am dealing with such data from the WLS, I might as well look at the other surveys again. Like the supplementary studies of the WLS, some of the other studies did not have delimited fields, so access is utterly dependent on extracting column information from the SAS files. So much harder than dealing with nice CSV data.
Anyway, if anyone does have access to the now restricted datasets, I would like some help obtaining them, partly because they have been updated with more recent years, and partly because I hope for formatting improvements. — dpw