Preferences of adolescents – A dataset containing linked experimental task measures and register data

Abstract

Between March 2019 and March 2020, we visited 53 school groups (classes) in 9 Hungarian schools to measure time, risk, social and competitive preferences of 1108 secondary school students using incentivized laboratory experimental tasks.We applied the unfolding brackets method to measure time preferences [1], and the bomb-risk elicitation task [2] to test risk preferences. For assessing competitive preferences, we utilized a real effort task (counting zeros) and used the three-round measure of competition [3]. We applied three different games to test social preferences: the dictator game, the trust game, and a simple public good game. We gave out vouchers for the school buffet to incentivize the experiments. We then took these anonymously measured preferences and connected them to the administrative panel of the National Assessment of Basic Competencies (NABC) using the hash codes provided by the Education Authority. We gain all additional information on gender, parental background, standardized test scores and school performance (grades) from the NABC data.The dataset provides detailed insights into how preferences of upper secondary school students associate with educational outcomes, social background and gender. The database contains rich background data on the individual level. We observe students nested in classes (groups of students having most of their courses together) nested in schools which allows the analyst to see how the background variables relate to preferences not only on the individual level, but also within schools and within classes. Moreover, as we measure nine aspects of the four most widely used preferences at once, we can assess these relationships more precisely, conditional on correlated preferences. In an accompanying paper we study gender differences in preferences of adolescents using this dataset [4].