Use our data

The Young Lives datasets from the first five rounds of household and child surveys, school surveys, and Call 1 of the COVID-19 Phone Survey are publicly archived and available to download from the UK Data Service, along with the documentation and questionnaires for each survey round. For users in our study countries, they are also available on CD-Rom, on request from the Principal Investigator.

The Round 4 survey data was archived in March 2016. The survey documentation is available on the Round 4 documentation page.

The fieldwork for the Round 5 survey was completed in March 2017 and the data was archived in July 2018. The survey documentation is available on the Round 5 documentation page.

The Listening to Young Lives at Work: COVID-19 Phone Survey, First Call data was archived in September 2020 and is available from the UK Data Service.  All the Phone Survey documentation is available on the Young Lives at Work Phone Survey page

Using our data

Users are required to register and apply for a password with the UK Data Service and sign a confidentiality agreement before they can access the data. We also ask that users inform the UK Data Service and Young Lives of any analysis or publications resulting from their work with the dataset.  If you use the Young Lives data in any publication, please follow the UKDS guidelines for citing data and use the following acknowledgement:

‘The data used in this publication come from Young Lives, a 20-year study of childhood poverty and transitions to adulthood in Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam (www.younglives.org.uk). Young Lives is funded by UK aid from the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office and a number of further funders. The views expressed here are those of the author(s). They are not necessarily those of Young Lives, the University of Oxford, FCDO or other funders.’

Details of the citation and acknowledgement are also available on the UKDS Young Lives Round 4 documentation page.

Our qualitative data

Data from our longitudinal qualitative research are not archived in the same way as the survey data because of concerns about confidentiality. If you have questions or require further details, please contact our lead qualitative researcher Gina Crivello.

Protecting the confidentiality of our study children and sites

As part of our ethical commitments, we have guaranteed to protect the anonymity and confidentiality of our study sites and respondents so we only make geographical identifiers available at region level in Ethiopia, district level in India, province level in Peru, and province level in Vietnam. We do not release any location data on a lower level.