Gender

• Child
• Young Adult

Child

The official fertility record in the mother's main Youth record is reconciled with reports in the child interview to ascertain the best determination of the child's gender. The gender of each child CSEX (reference number C00054.00) is created as a cross-round (XRND) key variable for all children regardless of age. CSEX is assigned to the CHILD BACKGROUND area of interest. A comparable variable (YASEX), just for children ever interviewed as Young Adults, can be found in the YA COMMON KEY VARIABLES area of interest.

Young Adult

The Young Adult cohort includes both male and female offspring of the NLSY79 mothers. The Y06774.00 XRND variable indicates a sex of Young Adult composition of 4434 males and 4239 females.

Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation Questions

While the Young Adult survey has allowed for the reporting of same-sex dating and relationships and has included questions about attitudes towards gender roles, gender identity and sexual orientation have not been directly addressed. With the growing openness about and awareness of these issues and how they might affect the lives of respondents, questions about gender identity and sexual orientation were added to the self-report section of the YA2018 survey. In the 2020 interview, these questions were asked of respondents not interviewed in 2018. Although asked in the same section of the survey, these two topics were not asked back to back.

There are three gender identity questions, one of which asks whether the respondent considers themselves to be a man, a woman, transgender, or something else (YASR-GENID-1). The other questions ask the respondents to rate how other people see them in appearance (YASR-GENID-2) and mannerisms (YASR-GENID-3) on a masculinity/femininity Likert scale. The sexual orientation question (YASR-SEXOR-1) asks if respondents consider themselves to be lesbian or gay, straight, bisexual, or something else.

Comparison to Other NLS Cohorts: Information on sex is available in the NLSY79. Sex for all biological children born to female members of the NLSY79 is available. Information on sex is also available for the NLSY97. Sex is implicit by membership in the Original Cohorts. For more precise details about the content of each survey, consult the appropriate cohort's User's Guide using the tabs above for more information.