LabFam Individual Biographies (LIB)

LabFam Individual Biographies (LIB) is an open science research infrastructure that provides harmonized, spell-based family and employment life-course histories for individuals observed in major longitudinal panel surveys.

The database is fully implemented, validated, and ready for use. Researchers can now generate comparable life-course histories across countries using openly available R code.

What is LIB?

LIB harmonizes individual-level longitudinal data into continuous life-course trajectories along three key domains:

• Fertility histories – timing and number of biological (and adopted, where available) children
• Partnership histories – union formation, cohabitation, marriage, separation, divorce, and widowhood
• Employment histories – monthly labor market status spells (employment, unemployment, inactivity, retirement)

Instead of point-in-time interview data, LIB produces dated spells with explicit start and end points, making it particularly suitable for event-history analysis.

Scientific potential

LIB substantially lowers the entry costs to comparative life-course research. It enables researchers to:

• Study fertility, partnership, and employment transitions jointly
• Analyze timing, sequencing, and duration of life events
• Compare life-course dynamics across countries
• Examine interactions between family formation and labor market careers
• Conduct reproducible, transparent longitudinal analyses

Data coverage

LIB currently harmonizes data from five long-running national panel surveys:

• Germany – SOEP (German Socio-Economic Panel)
• Switzerland – SHP (Swiss Household Panel)
• United Kingdom – BHPS / UKHLS (British Household Panel Survey / Understanding Society)
• United States – PSID (Panel Study of Income Dynamics)
• Australia – HILDA (Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia)

Together, these panels cover individual life courses from the late 1960s to the early 2020s, depending on the country.

Important: LIB does not redistribute survey microdata. Users must obtain access to the original panel data from the respective data providers. LIB supplies the open-source code that reconstructs harmonized biographies once access is granted.

Code and documentation:

All code needed to construct the LIB datasets is openly available on GitHub:

🔗 GitHub repository:
LIB IN GITHUB REPOSITORY

• Implemented in R (version 4.4.0)
• Modular and configurable
• Allows users to select:
  • countries
  • life-course domains (fertility, partnership, employment)
  • observation periods
  • output formats (R, CSV, Stata)

LIB also includes scripts to merge LIB with the Comparative Panel File (CPF), enabling enrichment with additional individual- and household-level variables.

The methodology, structure, and validation of LIB are documented in a data note preprint:

📄 Weychert et al. (2024) – LabFam Individual Biographies: harmonised family and employment histories based on panel surveys
DOI: https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-8376548/v1

Team

• Ewa Weychert
• Beata Osiewalska
• Lucas van der Velde
• Anna Matysiak