Appendix 11: Collection of the Transcript Data (High School)

Data Collection Variables

Transcript Record Status and Transcript Wave

The Transcript Record Status variable is provided for all 8,984 respondents in the NLSY97 sample. For each respondent, the variable indicates whether or not a transcript was requested for the youth, and as appropriate, why a transcript was not requested, or why a transcript was not received. The second variable, available for all respondents with transcript data, reports whether the respondent's data was collected in wave 1 or wave 2 of the transcript survey.

Characteristics of Youth's Primary School

These variables pertain to the school from which the youth's transcript was primarily collected. In most cases, this is the last school that the youth attended. Three variables were extracted from Quality Education Data (QED) data files:

Four additional variables were coded from a variety of sources. In priority order, we captured information from hard-copy school catalogs, on-line school catalogs, other on-line school information, or telephone calls to school staff. Information is valid for the 2004-2005 school year.

Data Quality Flag

This flag, called TRANS_PROBFLAG, was constructed to alert users to the existence of cases whose data we believed was incomplete or flawed in some way that would make the case less likely to provide useful information. The flag is a composite of five separate tests flagging different types of problems; a positive result for any one (or more) of those tests resulted in the case being coded 1 (Yes) for TRANS_PROBFLAG. The variable does not indicate how many flaws are present in a given case. The five component tests are:

Coding Information for Course Code Variables

As part of the NLSY97 Transcript Survey, project staff coded respondents' courses using the revised Secondary School Taxonomy of courses (SST-R). The SST-R codes use a combination of numbers and letters to create a unique identifier for each type and level of high school course content. Because the NLSY97 data base system requires that all data be in numeric form, it was necessary to convert the SST-R codes into numbers for use with the Transcript Survey data. The following table indicates the NLSY97 number assigned for each original SST-R code and course description. These codes were used in variables R97128.-R97251. (TRANS_CRS_CODE.01-.175) in the NLSY97 data set.

Table 4. Numeric Course Code, R-SST Codes and Code Descriptions