Understanding Society User Support

Hello JoAnn,

Alita is currently away but I'll try to help you. To construct the unemployment history you need to do the following:
1) to get the history covering the period of the duration of the study find all relevant variables from the Annual Events History module in each wave and put these together (so for each spell the variable coding non-employment status and the end date),
2) if you want the full lifetime unemployment history you need to combine the above with the information from the Employment Status History module asked in waves 1 and 5 available in the a_empstat and e_empstat files, please note that for the BHPS sample this information is not in these files as this was asked earlier in the BHPS, so you need to additionally use the BHPS equivalent of the Employment Status History module.

This is a rather complex task so you might find helpful the set of syntax files created and uploaded by one of the UKHLS data users, Liam Wright. It is available here: https://github.com/ljwright/work-life-histories-ukhls-bhps

I hope it helps.

Best wishes,
Piotr,
UKHLS User Support Team