Rochester Youth Development Study: Past, Present, and Future?

• In Event: Enhancing Accessibility and Unveiling Insights: New Directions of Key Developmental and Life Course Longitudinal Studies

Abstract

The Rochester Youth Development Study (RYDS) is a prospective, longitudinal study that began in 1988 and follows a cohort of 1,000 youth who were representative of the Rochester Public School 7th and 8th grade population during the 1987-1988 school year. Youth who resided in census tracts with elevated arrest rates and males were oversampled to better study the development of delinquency in drug use. To date, three phases of RYDS have been completed consisting of semi-annual (Phase 1 – 1988-1992), annual (Phase 2 – 1996-1999), and bi-annual interviews (Phase 3 – 2004-2006). Its intergenerational extension, the Rochester Intergenerational Study (RIGS), which includes the firstborn biological child of the original participants, commenced in 1999. Phase 4 of RYDS and Years 23 and 25 RIGS, which are funded by the National Institute of Justice, are currently underway. This presentation highlights the various goals of RYDS and RIGS through each phase of data collection and the resulting breadth of the measurement space. This is followed by a discussion of the current foci of RYDS and RIGS. The presentation concludes with a discussion of data availability and access.

Author

• Megan Bears Augustyn, Florida State University