Current WLS Activities
Forty-five years after the high school graduation of the original 10,317 participants, we returned to the field with another major round of data collection. We want to exploit the unique scientific value of the WLS to pursue a broad agenda of research on social and economic factors in health and aging. The new follow-up has been designed by scholars in diverse scientific fields: sociology, demography, epidemiology, economics, social and cognitive psychology, industrial engineering, neuroscience, social work, psychiatry, nursing, and medicine. The plan for data collection – of which the surveys are only the first phase – spans many modes: telephone and mail surveys, brain imaging, personal interviews, anthropometric measurement, bio-indicators, and content analysis of recorded interviews. These new data, along with the rich data presently available from the WLS, should resolve old questions and open new areas of interdisciplinary inquiry about health, aging, and the life course. All WLS data will be released to the research community as soon as they have been collected, cleaned, and documented. This round of data collection includes: (a) a one-hour telephone and 48-page mail survey of more than 9600 surviving graduates, 64-65 years old at the time of the survey; (b) a parallel telephone and mail survey of 7150 randomly selected siblings of the graduates (they vary widely in age and most were first surveyed in 1994; about 2100 were first interviewed in 1977); (c) a shorter (30-minute) telephone interview with spouses (N = 10,150) and widows (N = 850) of graduates and of their siblings. Our goal is to extend and enrich our observations of the WLS cohort since their adolescence in ways that will answer important research questions in aging for decades to come.