Health and Retirement Study Cross-Wave Harmonized Job Characteristics File for 1992-2018 HRS Wave Years

This data file contains harmonized information on HRS respondents' current main jobs at the time of the interview at the person-wave level. The purpose of this dataset is to link main jobs across waves and impute relevant variables which are missing or inconsistent. We produce this harmonized file because the characteristics of main jobs are complicated to track since information about these jobs is collected at different interview waves. Some characteristics are collected only at the first time the job is reported, some are collected every wave, and some are collected after the job ended.

This dataset contains both harmonized HRS variables and constructed variables. The harmonized HRS variables represent original HRS variables renamed so that the same variables have the same names in all waves and revised with consistent codes for missing values. The constructed variables recode these harmonized HRS variables so that they are comparable across waves and correct or impute missing or conflicting values. Associated flags are constructed to indicate whether the values are imputed and how they are imputed. This dataset does not contain all time- variant job characteristics, but users can easily merge those variables by respondents' household and person identification numbers and wave.

More information on variable harmonization and construction can be found in the accompanying Data Description and more information of the dataset variables can be found in the accompanying Codebook. Questions about this dataset and its use can be directed to the Census- Enhanced Health and Retirement Study (CenHRS) project at CenHRSinfo@umich.edu.

Suggested Citation

Census-Enhanced Health and Retirement Study. 2023. Health and Retirement Study Cross-Wave Harmonized Job Characteristics File for 1992-2018 HRS Wave Years, V2023-05-05 [dataset]. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan. https://cenhrs.isr.umich.edu/.

Please note that the authors are not responsible for errors resulting from the use of this dataset.

This work was produced as part of the Census-Enhanced Health and Retirement Study (CenHRS) project, which is supported by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Contributed projects based on HRS public data are provided by researchers who want to share their work with the research community. Researchers interested in contributing their own products are invited to contact us at hrsquestions@umich.edu. HRS does not produce or support these products and is not responsible for their content or use. They are provided here as a service to the research community.