Pairfam Activity Trajectories Dataset
This dataset contains German employment/activity trajectories for 1,027 individuals (month-level extract). It is derived from the teaching data accompanying Sequence Analysis (Raab & Struffolino, 2022). The companion site documents that those teaching examples come from the German Family Panel (pairfam), Release 10.0, shared with permission for instructional use (GESIS ZA5678, DOI 10.4232/pairfam.5678.10.0.0).
We provide two versions of the dataset:
- Year-level data: 22 yearly observations with state abbreviations
- Month-level data: 264 monthly observations (ages 18 to 40) with numeric state codes
Important Notes
- The IDs are different between year-level and month-level data and cannot be directly linked.
- State encoding differs: Year-level uses text abbreviations (e.g., "EDU", "FT"), while month-level uses numeric codes (1–8).
- The month-level activity and family files share the same 1,027 respondent IDs and can be aligned for multidomain analysis; year-level IDs cannot.
Data origin and processing
Source: Companion teaching extract (
Activitybio/ multichannel materials) based on pairfam Release 10.0. The shipped month-level file has 1,027 respondents (identical IDs topairfam_family_by_month).Processing by book authors: Employment and activity status was categorized into eight states (see encoding table).
Our preprocessing: Column renaming only (
activity1…activity264orstate1…state264→1…264). State integers were not recoded.Cleaning code: pairfam_and_little_green_book/code.
Verification: Against companion text-label activity sequences, numeric codes 1–8 map one-for-one to EDU, MIL/CS, PT, FT, SELF, PLEAVE, MARGINAL, UNEMP over all 264 months (crosstab diagonal). Some older Sequenzo tutorials used a different eight-label wording; prefer this table.
Result: An 8-state alphabet.
Activity states encoding
| Numeric Code | Abbreviation | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | EDU | Education |
| 2 | MIL/CS | Military/Civil Service |
| 3 | PT | Part-time Employment |
| 4 | FT | Full-time Employment |
| 5 | SELF | Self-employed |
| 6 | PLEAVE | Parental Leave |
| 7 | MARGINAL | Marginal Employment |
| 8 | UNEMP | Unemployed |
Year-level data
File: pairfam_activity_by_year.csv
This dataset contains 1,027 individuals observed over 22 years. The states are encoded directly as text abbreviations (e.g., "EDU", "FT", "PT", "PLEAVE").
No Covariates
Unlike the month-level data, the year-level data does not include any covariates. The id column contains randomly generated identifiers created during our preprocessing and cannot be linked to other datasets or the month-level data.
Structure
| Column | Description |
|---|---|
id | Individual identifier (simple sequential integers; cannot be linked to other datasets) |
1 … 22 | Yearly activity trajectory states, encoded as abbreviations (e.g., "EDU", "FT") |
Sample data
| id | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | … |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 194 | FT | PLEAVE | FT | FT | FT | FT | PLEAVE | PLEAVE | PLEAVE | FT | … |
| 896 | EDU | EDU | MIL/CS | FT | UNEMP | FT | FT | FT | FT | FT | … |
| 284 | EDU | EDU | EDU | EDU | EDU | EDU | FT | FT | FT | FT | … |
| 886 | EDU | EDU | EDU | EDU | EDU | EDU | EDU | EDU | EDU | UNEMP | … |
Month-level data
File: pairfam_activity_by_month.csv
This dataset contains 1,027 individuals observed monthly from ages 18 to 40 (264 months). The states are encoded as numeric codes (1–8) according to the encoding table above.
Structure
Besides the state sequences, the dataset includes several covariates:
| Column | Description |
|---|---|
id | Individual identifier (original pairfam IDs, e.g., 111000, 2931000) |
weight40 | Survey weight at age 40 (design weight) |
sex | Sex (1 = male, 0 = female) |
doby_gen | Year of birth (generation year) |
dob | Month-year of birth (numerical encoding) |
ethni | Ethnicity indicator |
migstatus | Migration background status |
yeduc | Years of education |
sat1i4, sat5, sat6 | Selected satisfaction indicators from the survey |
highschool | High school graduation status |
church | Church attendance indicator |
biosib | Number of biological siblings |
stepsib | Number of step-siblings |
east | Region indicator (East vs. West Germany) |
famstructure18 | Family structure at age 18 |
1 … 264 | Monthly activity trajectory states, coded 1–8 as above |
Sample data
| id | weight40 | sex | doby_gen | dob | ethni | migstatus | yeduc | highschool | church | biosib | east | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | … |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 111000 | 0.344 | 1 | 1971 | 855 | 1 | 1 | 11.5 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 4 | 4 | 4 | 4 | 4 | … |
| 2931000 | 1.767 | 0 | 1973 | 881 | 5 | 3 | 10.5 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | … |
| 3491000 | 0.727 | 1 | 1971 | 857 | 1 | 1 | 18.0 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | … |
Here columns 1–5 show the first five months of the trajectory, coded as 1–8 according to the state table above.
Reference
Raab, M., & Struffolino, E. (2022). Sequence analysis (Vol. 190). Sage Publications.
See Also
- pairfam family trajectories — family channel for the same month-level IDs.
- Datasets Overview helps choose a dataset by research question.
SequenceDatashows how to define sequences from a dataset.- Quickstart runs a complete analysis on a bundled dataset.
Author: Yuqi Liang