Scottish Young People's Survey Cohort 1983-84, Sweep 2 (SYPS1986)

Abstract

Scottish Young People's Survey Cohort 1983-84, Sweep 2 (SYPS1986). The SYPS is a series of large-scale postal surveys that asked young people aged 16-19 from Scottish secondary schools about their experiences of school and transitions to further and higher education or the labour market. They were commissioned by the Scottish government (and other government agencies) at a time of educational expansion and restructuring of the youth labour market. The SYPS cohort series was designed to gather longitudinal data from a nationally-representative sample of young people. The 1983-84 cohort comprised students who completed the compulsory stage of schooling (the S4 year stage) in the 1983-84 school year. They were first surveyed (sweep 1) approximately nine months later in spring 1985 when most were aged about 16-17: some young people were still at school, while others had entered further education, training or jobs. There was a second survey sweep one year later in spring 1986 (this is the dataset included in this section of datashare), and a third sweep in autumn 1987. Achieved sample sizes for the 1983-84 cohort were 6501 at sweep1, 5802 at sweep 2, and 4249 at sweep 3. The purpose of this longitudinal element of the survey was to follow the different post-16 transitions and pathways of individual young people, and analyse differences in relation to gender, social class, area, school and institutional contexts.