Philadelphia Educational Longitudinal Study
The Philadelphia Educational Longitudinal Study tracks approximately 2000 public school students in the School District of Philadelphia from the summer after the eighth grade year, in 1996, through to three years past expected graduation, 2003. Detailed telephone surveys of students and their parents were conducted with survey questions covering a wide range of topics, from attitude towards school, feeling of safety, sexual behavior, postsecondary expectations, access to information about colleges and careers, extracurricular activities, and civic engagement.
Led by Frank Furstenberg, distinguished professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, the study was primarily funded by The William Penn Foundation. Other funders included the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, the Consortium for Policy Research in Education, the Spencer Foundation, Johnson & Johnson, the Leo Model Foundation, the Philadelphia Education Fund, Pew Charitable Trusts, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
The William Penn Foundation awarded a follow-up grant to the Philadelphia Education Fund (PEF) in 2005 to further work with the PELS dataset. With an emphasis on making the data available to the research community, conducting further analysis, and disseminating the results to education professionals and policymakers, the Philadelphia Education Fund continues to ensurethat this important work is made known and is widely applied.
In 2009, PEF received further funding from the William Penn Foundation to transfer the data to Temple University's Social Science Data Library (SSDL). SSDL supports research and instruction in the social sciences by making its holdings freely available to faculty and students, by creating special files tailored to the needs of specific courses or research projects, by offering consultative assistance in the use of its holdings, by acquiring and creating new data sets in which there is likely to be instructional and research interest, and by introducing to users, new technologies which facilitate data analysis.
Learning Briefs using the PELS Dataset:
High School Planning: What PELS Tells Us about Student Engagement
Postsecondary Education: What PELS Tells Us about Pathways
Surveys
Here are links to the survey instruments for each wave of the study. Philadelphia Education Fund staff are in the process of adding summary descriptive statistics for each item. These statistics are in red text.
- Wave Overview
- Wave 1 Parents Stats-P Students Stats-S
(Summer 1996-after 8th grade) - Wave 2 Parents Stats-P Students Stats-S
(Fall 1996-9th grade*) - Wave 3 Parents Stats-P Students Stats-S
(Spring 1997-9th grade*) - Wave 4 Parents Stats-P Students Stats-S
(1997-1998 School Year-10th grade*) - Wave 5 Parents Stats-P Students Stats-S
(1998-1999 School Year-11th grade*) - Wave 6 Parents Stats-P Students Stats-S1 Stats-S2
(1999-2000 School Year-12th grade*) - Wave 7 Parents Stats-P Students Stats-S1 Stats-S2
(2002-2004)
* Grade level indicates expected grade in school, assuming on-time promotion; some students surveyed were in grades other than that indicated or no longer in school.