Understanding Society User Support

Dear Joe,

That is quite a big topic but I do my best to give a few (hopefully) useful hints. First of all, when you use the harmonised data (Study Number 6614) the variable pidp is a unique identifier that allows to link individuals across all waves of data they contributed (BHPS+UKHLS). Then, you can use parents identifiers to link the child data to the parents' data (e.g. fnspid, mnspid). To do such linkage you can use the code from this file: https://www.understandingsociety.ac.uk/sites/default/files/downloads/documentation/mainstage/syntax/stata/stata-parents-children-matching.do (in Stata). You can also find useful the xhhrel dataset which creates an individual level cross-wave file of all sample members (those who were ever enumerated as part of the study) that contains familial relationship identifiers reported over the survey period for each sample member. This file also contains an origin household identifier variable (osm_hh) which identifies the household they come from, so that sample members who are connected with each other can be identified (either because they were co-resident at some point or were co-resident with individuals who were co-resident with each other). You can read more about it here: https://www.understandingsociety.ac.uk/documentation/mainstage/user-guides/main-survey-user-guide/connecting-family-members-and-households-over-time

Finally, we recommend to use three user guides when working with the BHPS and UKHLS jointly:

1) the UKHLS User Guide: https://www.understandingsociety.ac.uk/documentation/mainstage/user-guides/main-survey-user-guide/
2) the BHPS User Guide: https://www.understandingsociety.ac.uk/sites/default/files/downloads/documentation/mainstage/user-guides/bhps-user-manual-volume-a.pdf
3) the harmonisation user guide: https://www.understandingsociety.ac.uk/sites/default/files/downloads/documentation/mainstage/user-guides/bhps-harmonised-user-guide.pdf

I hope it helps.

Best wishes,
Piotr Marzec
UKHLS User Support