The Child Development Supplement (CDS) is an integral and on-going component of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), a longitudinal survey of a nationally representative sample of U.S. families that began in 1968. With data collected on the same families and their descendants for 41 waves over 52 years (as of 2020), PSID is a cornerstone for empirical social science research in the U.S. Through its long-term measures of economic and social wellbeing, and based on its weighted representative sample of U.S. families that now includes two major immigrant refresher samples, the study has advanced research on the dynamics of social, economic, demographic, and health processes and their interrelationships. Five waves of CDS have been conducted: three on the original cohort of children born between 1985 and 1997 (in 1997, 2002/2003, and 2007/2008) and two waves (in 2014 and 2019) on the next generation of PSID children who were born between 1997 and 2019.
This project has two specific aims. The first is to design and field a follow-up wave of CDS in 2021, collecting re-interview data on children aged 2-17 years who participated in CDS-19, through interviews with primary caregivers and older children aged 12-17 years. The second specific aim is to process, document, and distribute the new CDS-21 data, with scale composites, generated variables, and individual-level links to detailed school data from the National Center for Education Statistics. The 2021 wave of CDS will, in conjunction with data from CDS-14 and CDS-19, provide unique and valuable prospective panel data to study the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, lockdown, and recession. The study will provide comprehensive and rich information on a large, nationally representative sample of children that includes an over-sample of African Americans and a new refresher sample of children in immigrant families. These data will be available free of charge through the PSID Online Data Center, which provides customized extracts and codebooks, detailed study documentation, and comprehensive user education and support.