Search Results

Author: Rohwer, Gotz
Resulting in 1 citation.
1. Rohwer, Gotz
Trappe, Heike
Describing Life Courses. An Illustration Based on NLSY Data
Presented: Florence, Italy, POLIS project conference at the European University Institute, February-March 1997.
Also: http://www.stat.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/papers.html
Cohort(s): NLSY79
Publisher: European Univeristy Institute (EUI)
Keyword(s): Career Patterns; Educational Attainment; Life Course; Methods/Methodology; Mobility, Occupational; Transition, School to Work

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

In this paper we try to contribute to a discussion of methods for describing life courses which might be useful for the polis project.
  • In section 1 we propose a simple data structure for representing life courses as sequences of states.
  • In section 2 we illustrate this proposal by using life history data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth NLSY.
  • It follows in section 3 a short discussion of cross sectional distributions for describing the evolution of life courses. It is shown that this approach although often used can easily be misleading.
  • A somewhat broader view focusing on the question of how to establish longitudinal classifications is taken in section 4. We investigate two methods for assessing the stability of group membership over time
  • We then begin with a discussion of describing life courses on an individual level One simple approach focusing on the occurrence of events is treated in section 5. We discuss how this approach can also be used for repeatable and complex events, e.g., transition from education to work.
  • Section 6 then raises the question whether we can hope to nd typical careers and begins a discussion of some problems connected with this idea
  • The discussion is continued in Section 7 where we use a simple clustering procedure to illustrate the difficulties in searching for typical careers.
Bibliography Citation
Rohwer, Gotz and Heike Trappe. "Describing Life Courses. An Illustration Based on NLSY Data." Presented: Florence, Italy, POLIS project conference at the European University Institute, February-March 1997.