Understanding Society User Support

Simone Angioloni wrote:

Hi,

I have a problem to identify the country of birth for a quite large number of observations from wave 2 to wave 7 included.

In the following part, I call missing observation every individual that I was not capable to identify the country of birth.

For the first wave, I used the variables wave_plbornc_all and wave_ukborn to recover this information. Overall, there are only 18 missing observations out of 50,994.

From waves 2 to 7, I know that the UKHLS administered "the place of birth" question only to the first-time respondents who did not answered these questions in the previous waves. Thus, I followed the suggestion from the UK Data Service Help Desk to recover the missing observations from the previous waves and from the file on the stable characteristics named "xwavedat". In addition, I could recover additional missing observations from the variable wave_ff_ukborn present from wave 2 to wave 7.

Nevertheless, I am still not capable to identify the country of birth for the following numbers of observations:

Wave 2: 1477
Wave 3: 1326
Wave 4: 1206
Wave 5: 1090
Wave 6: 984
Wave 7: 901

Notice that if I use the citizenship variables (wave_citzn1,2,3; wave_citzn_code; wave_citzn_code2), I have basically the very same problem. Due to the fact that from wave 2 to 7 the "place of birth" question was asked only to the first-time respondents, I believe that these are not really missing observations, but that I was not capable to find them.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thank you very much.

Sincerely,

Simone

Dear Simone,

Please note that this problem was corrected from Wave 3 onwards, so those entering the adult survey from being a youth participant are now asked this question.

Best wishes,
Stephanie Auty - Understanding Society User Support Officer