A study of serious adolescent offenders as they transition to adulthood and out of crime

Living Calendar

Description

Specific Information: Living Calendar

An account of where the research participant lived for the greatest part of each month during the recall period is collected, and provides variables that reflect aspects of the living arrangement for that month. We then collect information about each unique location and create summary variables. Below is a list of specific types of information that we have for the living calendar.

• For each unique location in which the subject lived during the recall period: we record the type of place lived (e.g., private home, facility), street address, and whether each location is considered public housing. Consolidating across the monthly reports: the proportion of time in specific living arrangements over the recall period.
• For the location where the individual lived for the greatest part of the recall period (the "main location"): people living with the participant, and a count of the number of people of each relationship type.
• Finally, we create cumulative variables which reflect a broader summary of the cumulative experience of the subject through a specific period of time. For example, proportion of months lived in a particular type of setting up to that timepoint, and the total number of address changes.

A more detailed list of the information available in this calendar appears below.

Additional sections related to this calendar

Other parts of the time point interview also provide information regarding the living situation of our subjects. This information can be used in conjunction with the information gathered in the calendar or it can be used independently. Specifically, there is a section of the interview where the subject provides information regarding the criminal activity of family members during the recall period (see the codebook section "Characteristics of Family"). This codebook section should be consulted for a more thorough explanation of available information.

Descriptive Information: Monthly Data Characterizing the Recall Period

As a standard practice, the specific calendar information will be accompanied by three variables which describe the recall period. This information is important for the user to consider when attempting to use data characterizing the recall period (e.g., measures) in conjunction with the monthly-level calendar data. In addition, this information is useful if the user is viewing events from a developmental perspective. These variables include:

• The actual number of days in each month that is represented in the calendar data.
• The calendar month and year mapped to the recall month (e.g., if S1M04 covers February 2003, the 'number of days' value for that month will be 28, and the calendar month associated with S1M04 will be 02/2003, "RealDate").
• The subject's age at each month of the recall period, available in two forms: 1) the subject's age truncated to a whole number, and 2) the age as a continuous variable. (The subject age at the time of the interview is available in the "Demographics" codebook, available under "Measures").

In addition, each dataset includes five variables which describe basic information related to the interview. These are explained in full detail in the "Interview Information" section under "Measures". These variables include the completion status of the interview, the date of the interview, version number in which the interview was conducted, the number of months in the recall period, and the number of days in the recall period.

General Information: Use of monthly life calendar data

Data regarding the participant's self-reported living situation is captured using a monthly life-calendar approach (Belli, 1998; Caspi, Moffitt, Thornton, & Freedman, 1996), where the research participant is provided with a visual calendar that contextualizes the recall of research data by anchoring information to salient events. Specifically, individuals are first asked to recount salient events which occurred in the recall period (e.g. birthdays, deaths) and this information remains visible to the participant as an anchor point for the timing of events in each of several life calendar domains. This approach thus creates an integrated view of activities in all of the domains examined, has firm roots in the science of how people remember events and life situations (Bradburn, Rips, and Shevell, 1987; Belli, 1998), and capitalizes on these processes to generate accounts of past events. On a practical level, it provides researchers with a richer set of data points. Instead of simply getting a summary measure of life changes over an extended recall period, the monthly life-calendar places these changes at specific points in time, opening up the possibility of examining sequences of events and potential causal mechanisms within individuals (Fals-Stewart, 2003; Mulvey, et al., 2006).

General Information: Conversion of data to linear months

The monthly Pathways data, in its raw form, is not suited for some kinds of analytic approaches (e.g., trajectory analysis). Each time point interview allows for a maximum of eight or 14 months in the recall period, depending on the follow-up wave (eight months was the maximum for time points 6-36 and 14 was the maximum for time points 48-84). This means that there is a corresponding variable in the dataset reflecting events occurring in each of those months through a maximum of 14 months (the outer limit of any of the possible months covered). If however, the recall period did not include the maximum number of months (as is most often the case), there will be variables with no data. For example, subject 1 has a recall period of five months for follow-up 12 so this means he/she will have data in five monthly variables but not in the remaining nine. Subject 2, has seven months in the recall period for follow-up 12 so he/she will have data in all but seven of the monthly variables. The recall length is set by programming code based on the current date in relationship to the date of the previous interview (see "Interview Information" under Measures for a more detailed description of how the length of the recall period is determined). However, the programming code did permit the interviewer to "reset" by hand the length of the recall period. This was done infrequently, but in some instances it created a situation where we obtained two reports of the same month. For example, follow-up 6 covered months January to June and the interviewer resets the follow-up 12 recall period to start with June (leading to two different reports for the month of June). A series of data cleaning decisions (described in the "Living Calendar Documentation") were implemented to correct these situations but we note them here because they are relevant to the conversion of the data to linear months.

The "linear months" data set-up corrects these two situations. The "linear months" data reformats the variables so that each variable is a sequential representation of life event data for each month of the research participant's life from the baseline interview forward. In this format, variables that were place-markers for months not covered in the recall period are eliminated and situations where there were two reports for the same month are corrected. Thus, "linear month 8" actually represents eight calendar months from the baseline and "linear month 16" is actually 16 months past the baseline interview.

A specific list of variables available in the linear format is provided below. Also provided is a "map" to link the linear month back to the recall period and month in which the information was originally collected. This is important to know when recall-level data is being used in conjunction with the monthly event calendar data.

Data Issues

• The follow06 through follow36 timepoints allow for a maximum of 8 months in the recall period, while follow48 and later will have a maximum of 14. Note that while variables for months 9 through 14 are included in the datasets for follow06 through follow36, these are essentially place markers and in no instance will any case have data for these months until the follow48 period (see description above).
• Due to a programming error, the interview allowed the subject to receive the household composition items when the main living location was a group home. Household composition items have been removed for this type of residential stay, but not for stays classified as type "other" (which includes halfway houses and Job Corp locations). If exclusion of these types of locations is desired, data should be removed from all items in the household composition section, including HHNum (Number of persons in the household) and relationship codes (relationship of persons living in the household to the subject).
• An error in the interview programming code made it possible for the subject to either skip the calendar completely, or to exit without fully completing the calendar. Cases with this issue are noted with a missing value code of -700 (Data missing: result of a programming error).
• Beginning with interview version 01.16, all questions relating to the subject's primary caregiver were only asked if the subject was age 19 or younger.
• During interview versions 01.14 through 01.16, all questions relating to the subject running away from home were only asked if the subject had a primary caregiver during the recall period. For all versions prior to 01.14 and after 01.17, these questions were always asked.

Information available based on the living situation

For an overview and a detailed list of the questions included with this calendar please select the link(s). In addition to providing an overview of the "flow" of the calendar and a detailed listing of the questions, this document notes version issues (i.e. questions/variables that are only present for a sub-sample due to their later addition to the interview) and provides other information that is critical to using and interpreting the data correctly. The table below gives you an overview of issues related to each construct noted above and it also provides you with the page numbers within our detailed document that address each of these constructs. Please be sure to consider this information carefully before moving forward with your analysis.

Click here to download a detailed document in PDF format.

References

• Caspi, A., Moffitt, T., Thornton, A., Friedman, D., Amell, J., Harrington, H., et al. (1996). The Life History Calendar: A research and clinical assessment method for collecting retrospective event-history data. International Journal of Methods in Psychiatric Research, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., US, 6(2), 101-114.
• Belli, R.F. (1998). The structure of autobiographical memory and the event history calendar: Potential improvements in the quality of retrospective reports in surveys. Memory, 6(4), 383-406

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