Cross-Wave Marital History Aggregated Data

The Cross-wave Marital History Aggregated data consist of information derived from public-release data collected in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), which is funded under a cooperative agreement between the National Institute on Aging (NIA) and the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan. The HRS is designed to study labor force, health, and family transitions of the U.S. population aged 51 and older, and the impact of those transitions on economic resources, claims on structured programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, informal assistance and transfers to and from family members as well as health and well-being in later life.

Our main objective in the preparation of the cross-wave marital history was to create a single user-friendly data file for each panel participant from 1992 to 2018 that summarizes the number and chronological order of all reported marriages together with the start/end dates and transition type if a marriage ended (e.g., separation, divorce, widowhood). Partnership history is not included in this file. The marital history data were aggregated using retrospective reports provided by HRS respondents or their proxy in different waves of biennial core panel interviews from 1992 to 2018. All information has previously been released separately as a public core data product for each biennial wave. It was collected in different sections within each wave.