Negotiating the Life Course, 1997

Type

Collection

Title

Brief Title

NLC 1997

Collection Type

Dataset

Access Privileges

Negotiating the Life Course

DOI - Digital Object Identifier

10.4225/13/50BBFB08558CF

Website Address

http://nlc.anu.edu.au/
http://www.ada.edu.au/ada/01015

Metadata Language

English

Data Language

English

Brief Description

The Negotiating the Life Course Project is designed to study the changing life courses and decision-making processes of Australian men and women as the family and society move from male breadwinner orientation in the direction of higher levels of gender equity.

The project has six aims:

*to extend the theories of human capital and new home economics in explaining women's and men's labour force participation;

*to map women's and men's work trajectories over their life course, from career entry into retirement, and to develop explanatory models of career trajectories;

*to identify those aspects of the family-household system and the labour market that facilitate or impede women's involvement with the labour market;

*to investigate the interrelationships between labour force decisions about family formation and household arrangements;

*to identify the portfolio of resources that women and men draw upon throughout their lives when making decisions about career and family;

*to assess the policy implications of the findings of the project for the institutions of the welfare state, the labour market and the family.

Full Description

Negotiating the Life Course (NLC) is a longitudinal study undertaken by the Australian Demographic and Social Research Institute, Australian National University and the School of Social Science, University of Queensland. It is designed to study the changing life courses and decision-making processes of Australian men and women as the family and society move from male breadwinner orientation in the direction of higher levels of gender equity. The project has six aims; to extend the theories of human capital and new home economics in explaining women's and men's labour force participation; to map women's and men's work trajectories over their life course, from career entry into retirement, and to develop explanatory models of career trajectories; to identify those aspects of the family-household system and the labour market that facilitate or impede women's involvement with the labour market; to investigate the interrelationships between labour force decisions about family formation and household arrangements; to identify the portfolio of resources that women and men draw upon throughout their lives when making decisions about career and family; and to assess the policy implications of the findings of the project for the institutions of the welfare state, the labour market and the family.

Variables included relationship and fertility histories, household work, child care arrangements, future objectives, attitudes to work, promotion, children and relationships. Background variables included parental country of birth, employment, occupation and education, respondent's and spouse's place of residence, education, income, housing, religion, health status, birthplace, marital status and household composition.

Detailed information is gathered relating to lifetime experiences of paid employment, education and training, relationships and childbearing. Considerable information is also gathered in relation to current employment and training, child care, household division of labour, caring and voluntary work, and a range of attitudes, values and expectations. In addition, standard socio-demographic descriptors are obtained.

NLC is a national random telephone survey using the electronic white pages as its sample frame. It is set up as an indefinite life, panel survey. In the first wave of the NLC project, 2231 people took part. Participants were from all around Australia. The larger states had a larger number of participants. The response rates were highest in Tasmania and the Australian Capital Territory, intermediate in Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia and in New South Wales and Victoria outside of Sydney and Melbourne. Sydney and Melbourne had lower response rates with Sydney being particularly low – this was put down to language problems due to large numbers of non-English speakers in these cities, and suggests the need for translation facilities in the future. Despite concerns about the response rate, the 1997 study seems broadly representative of the Australian population.

Because only one person per household was interviewed, the unweighted sample under-represents households with more than one eligible respondent relative to households where there is only one eligible respondent. A weighting factor has been provided to take account of this bias in the unweighted sample when population estimates are being made. Weighting makes no difference to the distribution by sex. The main impact of weighting is in the distribution of the sample by living arrangement. Weighting shifts about five percent of respondents 'not in a relationship' to 'married'.

The data is available on the Australian Data Archive (ADA) in a variety of formats.

The above description draws upon Peter McDonald, et al, The Negotiating the Life Course Survey Experience (Paper prepared for the Panel Data and Policy Conference, Rydges Canberra: 1-3 May 2000).

Contact Email

nlc@anu.edu.au

Contact Address

Negotiating the Life Course Project
Australian Demographic & Social Research Institute
The Australian National University
Canberra ACT 0200

Contact Phone Number

+61 2 6125 1549

Contact Fax Number

+61 2 6125 3031

Principal Investigator

Peter McDonald

Collaborators

F. Jones; D. Mitchell; J. Baxter

Fields of Research

160805 - Social Change
1608 - Sociology
160301 - Family and Household Studies

Socio-Economic Objective

940501 - Employment Patterns and Change
970116 - Expanding Knowledge through Studies of Human Society

Keywords

Careers
Child care
Education
Employment
Family
Fertility
Gender
Health
Home economics
Housing
Human capital
Human relations
Income
Marriage
Occupations
Religion

Type of Research Activity

Pure basic research

Date Coverage

Date From	Date To
1997	1997

Time Period

1997

Geospatial Location

Location Type	Location Value
iso19139dcmiBox	name=Australia; northlimit=-9.221084; southlimit=-54.777218; westlimit=112.921454; eastlimit=159.105459

Date of data creation

1997

Year of data publication

1999

Creator(s) for Citation

Given Name	Surname
Peter	McDonald
F.	Jones
Deborah	Mitchell
J.	Baxter

Publisher for Citation

Australian Data Archive

Publications

Identifier Type
uri
Identifier Value
http://lifecourse.anu.edu.au/publications/Discussion_papers/NLCDP001.pdf
Publication Title
McDonald, P., Evans, A., Baxter, J., and Gray, E. (2000) Negotiating the Life Course survey experience. Negotiating the Life Course Discussion Paper Series, NLCDP 001.
Publication Reference

Related Websites

URL	Title
http://nlc.anu.edu.au/	Negotiating the Life Course
http://lifecourse.anu.edu.au/publications/	Negotiating the Life Course publications
http://adsri.anu.edu.au/	Australian Demographic and Social Research Institute
http://lifecourse.anu.edu.au/data.php	Negotiating the Life Course codebooks and updates

Rights held in and over the data

It is a citation requirement that all manuscripts based in whole or in part on these data should: (i) identify the data, original investigators and data distributors by including the bibliographic reference for the data file as McDonald, P. Negotiating the Life Course, 1997 [computer file]. Canberra: Australian Social Science Data Archive, The Australian National University, 1997; and (ii) declare that those who carried out the original analysis and collection of the data bear no responsibility for the further analysis or interpretation of them. Queries concerning rights and reproduction/re-use of the data should be directed to ada@anu.edu.au. Queries concerning the data should be directed to nlc@anu.edu.au or by phoning +61 (0)2 6125 1549.

Rights statement
© Australian National University, 1987.

Contacts

Ph: +61 2 6125 2200

Fax:+61 2 6125 0627

Australian Data Archive
c/o Australian National University
18 Balmain Lane
Acton
ACT
0200

Retention Period

Indefinitely

Data Size

4.8Mb SPSS Portable; 14.1Mb Stata v8; 13.3Mb Stata v7; 7.1Mb Nesstar Publisher; 7.1Mb NSDStat; 13.1Mb DIF; 7.3Mb dBase; 7.3Mb Fixed width text; 4.1Mb Delimited; 7.4Mb SAS; 4.9Mb CSV File

Status: Published
Published To:
- Australian National Data Service
Identifier: anudc:3322

Please login to request access to this dataset