yowie

The goal of yowie is to provide longitudinal wages data sets along with several demographic variables of Americans from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79) from Round 1 (the survey year 1979) to Round 28 (the survey year 2018). The NLSY79 is a longitudinal project held by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics that follows the lives of a sample of American youth born between 1957-64. The cohort originally included 12,686 respondents ages 14-22 when first interviewed in 1979. There are three data sets provided in this package:

  • wages: The wages data from the cohort whose highest grade completed is up to 12th grade.
  • wages_hs_do: The wages data of the high school dropouts.
  • demog_nlsy79: The demographic data of the NLSY79 cohort.

Installation

You can install the development version from GitHub with:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("numbats/yowie")

Example

Here is the example of plotting some samples of subjects in wages_hs using brolgar (Tierney, Cook, and Prvan, 2020).

library(yowie)
library(brolgar)
library(ggplot2)

set.seed(20210217)

ggplot(yowie::wages, 
       aes(x = year,
           y = wage,
           group = id)) +
  geom_line(alpha = 0.7) +
  facet_sample() +
  ylab("mean hourly wage") +
  theme_bw()

About the package name

A yowie is a mythical creature in Australian foklore akin to Big Foot or Sasquatch in north America. In terms of the package it can be considered an acronym: Years Of Wages to Investigate and Explore.