Understanding Society User Support

Melanie,

1. Is there any documentation that allows me to easily check whether a BHPS variable is available in Understanding Society as well and to find out what the corresponding variable name in US is?

The user guide explains how Understanding Society has been designed to incorporate the BHPS sample. The design papers also outline some of the differences between the two surveys. Where UKHLS questionnaire modules are close to identical to BHPS, we try to keep variable names consitent with BHPS. That's the general case, now for the specific..

2. I am trying to link some information about mothers (from indresp) to their children (birthweight, date of birth...). I am having a hard time getting the kids data together because part of it seems to be located in nat_child and part in child. Is this correct?

Suggest you give some more detail here about the analysis and the variables you would like to use.

3. With which identifiers do I merge data on mothers with their kids?

The user guide shows a way to match individuals within a household. For your purpose you could use pno of bioloigcal mother instead of pno of partner/spouse (hgpart)

Jakob

NATCHILD records both resident and non-resident children (together identified by childno) - only the former will have been enumerated (identified by lchno).

a_lchlv -- child resident - biological
           1   yes
           2   no
           3   died
           4   stillborn

To get the age of resident children (of any age) you could merge in the age variable from the enumeration grid.

To do this in Stata you could temporarily rename the identifiers like this

use a_natchild, clear
rename a_pno a_apno
rename a_lchno a_pno 
merge m:1 a_hidp a_pno using a_indall, keepus(a_sex a_dvage) keep(1 3) nogen