Attrition is the Achilles heel of longitudinal surveys. Drawing on our experience in the Indonesia Family Life Survey (IFLS), we describe survey design and field strategies that contributed to minimizing attrition over four waves of the survey. The data are used to illustrate the selectivity of...

After over a quarter century of sustained economic growth, Indonesia was struck by a large and unanticipated crisis at the end of the 20th Century. Real GDP declined by about 12% in 1998. Using 13 years of annual labor force data in conjunction with two waves of a household panel, the Indonesia...

Identifying the impact of parental death on the well-being of children is complicated because parental death is likely to be correlated with other, unobserved, factors that affect child well-being. Population-representative longitudinal data collected in Aceh, Indonesia, before and after the...

Attrition is the Achilles heel of longitudinal surveys. Drawing on our experience in the Indonesia Family Life Survey, we describe survey design and field strategies that contributed to minimizing attrition over four waves of the survey. The data are used to illustrate the selectivity of...

Data from three waves of the Indonesia Family Life Survey (IFLS) are used to examine follow-up and attrition in the context of a large scale panel survey conducted in a low-income setting. Household-level attrition between the baseline and first follow-up four years later is less than 6 percent;...

After almost three decades of sustained economic growth, Indonesia is currently in the midst of a major economic and financial crisis. This paper seeks to contribute new evidence on three questions: who has been affected most by the crisis, how they have been affected and how they have responded...

The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami was an extremely destructive event in Aceh, Indonesia, killing over 160,000 people and destroying infrastructure, homes, and livelihoods over miles of coastline. In its immediate aftermath, affected populations faced a daunting array of challenges. At the population...