Understanding Society User Support

Yes, exactly. I just noticed that there are different values : -9 is inapplicable and 0 date of the marriage is missing. So I had the same thought. My only question is whether it refers to any kind of marriage or just in the panel.
Thank you.
Best,
Lydia

Ok, . That was what I was looking for! Ijust got confused by the two values.

So basically, if they had already been married at the time time of the interview (divorced, ...) they have zero.
If they had not, the label is -9, that is inapplicable.

So I guess that this should be valid also for BHPS, apart from those interviewed between wave 3 and 7, who were not asked about previous cohabitations, right?

Thank you very much for this clarification!
Best,
Lydia

Hi Lydia,

All information about marriage and cohabitations reported, whether as part of the histories, or current status are used to produce these variables.

If we know someone was ever married then evermar_dv=1, if they have reported never married or cohabiting as a couple for all the interviews and we have no other information that they were ever married then evermar_dv=2. If we don't have this information then it is -9.

If we know they were ever married but we don't have information about their first marriage, then the date of the first marriage is set to 0.
If we know they were never married or we don't know if they were married or not, then the date of first marriage is set to -9.
By the way marriage includes marital status = married or civil partnership.

Similar principles are used for the ever cohabited, date of first cohabitation and any child, date of birth of first child variables.

Best wishes,
Alita

Hi Alita,

Thank you.

I think that for evermar the coding that you mention is quite in line with my thoughts.
I have some more problems in interpreting evercoh, as it is often not in line with the variables
lcoh and lcohnpi of the panel (maybe mostly for BHPS).

I know that this file is updated every year, so for most of the interviewees who formed a cohabitation/marriage in the panel, it is quite difficult to understand if they had a cohabitation before the current union by just looking at that variable.

However, I still do not explain why some individuals have a value of 2 in lcoh and a value of 3 for evercoh.
I remember that there was a problem on this variable, since some individuals were misclassified. Is this the case?

So far, I am relying on lcoh and lcohnpi for identifying whether people had a cohabitation before the entry into the panel. Would you think it is ok?

Thank you again for all your help.
Best,
Lydia