Midlife in the United States (MIDUS 1) National Study of Daily Experiences (NSDE), 1996-1997

Abstract

The National Study of Daily Experiences (NSDE) is one of the in-depth studies that are part of the MacAuthur Foundation National Survey of Midlife in the United States (MIDUS). The purpose of the NSDE is to examine the day-to-day lives, particularly the daily stressful experiences, of a subsample of MIDUS respondents. Although previous daily diary research has advanced understanding of daily stress processes, there are important limitations in these studies that are addressed in the NSDE. First, previous studies in this area have relied on small and often unrepresentative samples that limit the ability to generalize findings. For this reason, the NSDE uses a large national sample of adults in the United States. Second, previous studies of individual differences in exposure and reactivity to daily events have typically examined only one source of variability, such as personality, to the exclusion of others. The NSDE corrects this problem by utilizing the data collected in the larger MIDUS survey on a wide array of sociodemographic and psychosocial variables to study the determinants of exposure and reactivity to daily stress. Third, previous studies have failed to investigate the role of genetics in both exposure and reactivity to daily stressors. The NSDE has a subsample of identical and fraternal same-sex twin pairs in order to explore this issue. The twins were selected if twin pairs had high self-reported certainty of zyogosity, had completed the MIDUS interview and questionnaires, and had mailed in their cheek cell samples. A wide range of information was obtained using the daily telephone interview. Conducting interviews for an entire year provided information about seasonal variation in daily experiences. Respondents completed an average of 7.2 of the 8 interviews resulting in a total of 10,397 days of interviews. Data collection consisted of 40 separate flights of interviews with each flight representing the eight-day sequence of interviews from approximately 33 respondents. The entire interview was CATI programmed, which enabled researchers to incorporate skip patterns and open ended probe questions as well as to keypunch data during the interview, allowing data cleaning throughout the data collection. Demographic information includes gender and age.