Making family connections across different households over time can be difficult. To help researchers link families we have created a family matrix datafile xhhrel.
This datafile identifies all family relationships across the Study, allowing researchers to see where people and households connect. Each year information is collected about core sample members and who they are currently living with in the same household, every year from the time they are selected into the Study. This is provided in the file w_egoalt and includes the relationships of every household member i.e., how each household member pair relate to each other. However, this only records information about co-resident household members. Combining information from across the waves, we can attach information about family members to the respondent (even if they are not co-resident). This enables analysts to expand the type of research questions they are able to answer. For example, do individuals tend to partner with those with similar educational qualifications? What is the degree of social mobility in the UK? To help users link families more easily the family matrix (xhhrel) identifies all family relationships consistently across the study and helps facilitate research on family connections.
The xhhrel file creates an individual level cross-wave file of all sample members (those who were ever enumerated as part of the study) that contains familial relationship identifiers reported over the survey period for each sample member. This file also contains an origin household identifier variable (osm_hh) which identifies the household they come from, so that sample members who are connected with each other can be identified (either because they were co-resident at some point or were co-resident with individuals who were co-resident with each other).
Further details about why we should use the family matrix Xhhrel file, its data structure and linking to the main survey can be found in the Family Matrix Xhhrel User Guide. To help use the file, we have provided syntax for some common procedures we think users might want to do.
