Malaysian Family Life Survey (MFLS)

DESCRIPTION:  The First Malaysian Family Life Survey, 1976-1977 (MFLS-1) was conducted in Peninsular Malaysia as a retrospective life history survey of 1,262 households containing an ever-married woman aged 50 or younger. Full life histories were collected through personal interviews with these women and their husbands regarding fertility-related events, marriage, employment, migration, income and wealth, attitudes and expectations with respect to family size and composition, community characteristics, time allocation, and transfers of goods, help, and money between the respondents and others. The survey collected data in three separate rounds held at four-month intervals. The majority of the survey was administered in Round 1, while the second and third rounds collected data on new questions not asked in Round 1 and also updated some of the Round 1 data, most notably the work and pregnancy histories. In October 1981, the individual-level dataset (Part 218) was created, consisting of one fixed-length record per individual per household. Variables included at both the individual and household levels provide information on demographics, time allocation, and income and wealth. Due to processing constraints, most of the retrospective data have been omitted from the individual-level dataset.

ORIGINATING AGENCY / PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR(S):  William Butz and Julie DaVanzo ('76-'77), Julie DaVanzo and John Haaga ('88)

RELATED WEB SITES:
MFLS Web Page at RAND
MFLS Data Updates
Meta Data Page about the MFLS at NICHD

PRI FACULTY, AFFILIATES, AND STUDENTS: Please note that additional data is available beyond what we have here. If you are interested in seeing what other data is available, go to ICPSR and search on "Malaysian Family Life Survey" or on study numbers 6170 and 9805. If you would like the archive to obtain additional data, please contact the Data Archivist. RAND collected a third wave in 1999 which should be available sometime in the near future.

 

Year(s) / Wave(s)	Abstract?	Data Location	Input Statement	Document Location
1976-1977 limited data files see README	Yes	POPNET:  /nfs/data/public/mfls/1977 /da6170*.*.gz	POPNET: /nfs/data/public/mfls/1977 /sa6170*.*.gz (SAS) or /sp6170*.*.gz (SPSS)	POPNET:  /nfs/data/public/mfls/1977 /codebook/*.pdf
1988 limited data files see README	Yes	POPNET:  /nfs/data/public/mfls/1988 /da9805*.*.gz Data is available by specific subdirectory and in the main 1988 directory. See POPNET README for more details	By request	POPNET: /nfs/data/public/mfls/1988 /codebook/*.pdf

DATA DISSEMINATED BY:

RAND and ICPSR