Volume 30, Number 5 1995
Soldo, Beth J., and Martha S. Hill. 1995. "Family Structure and Transfer Measures in the Health and Retirement Study: Background and Overview." Journal of Human Resources 30(5):S108-S137.
This paper describes the rationale for and the measures of family structure and inter-vivos giving in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). Of particular interest to the HRS is the extent to which transfers affect the labor supply of donors, especially women. Because all children and parents are individually profiled, HRS data can be used to examine the joint allocation of space, time, and money among competing kin. Data on siblings of respondents with living parents further opportunities to consider how adult children distribute the burden of parent care among themselves. Using the baseline HRS, we describe the quality of data on kin attributes and the correlations among family structures, transfers, and work.
Beth J. Soldo is a professor of demography at Georgetown University. Martha S. Hill is an associate research scientist professor at the Institute for Social Research (ISR), the University of Michigan. This is a revised version of a paper presented at the HRS Early Results Workshop, Ann Arbor, Michigan, in September 1993. Support for this paper was provided by the National Institute of Aging to the University of Michigan (U01 AG09740), F. Thomas Juster, Principal Investigator. The HRS Working Group on Family Structure/Transfers included Toni Antonucci, Jim House, Bob Kahn, Bob Marans (ISR, University of Michigan), and Mark Hayward (Pennsylvania State University). Larry Bumpass (N.B. Ryder Professor of Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison) generously shared his insights from fielding the National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH) and unpublished tabulations from these data. Kirsten Alcser assisted with the development of the family structure and transfer section of the HRS and saw it through two focus groups, numerous drafts, and several pretests. The authors also acknowledge the helpful comments of two anonymous reviewers and the able research assistance of Kathy Kitayama in processing the data. All errors remain the responsibility of the authors. The data used in this article are from the beta release of the HRS.
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