Using This Manual

This manual has been designed for the users of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey data.

Use the menu on the left to navigate around the manual.

The manual aims to cover all of the things that you need to know to use the HILDA data – such as missing data conventions, an introduction to the derived variables, how to put the data files together, income imputation, how to find your way around the documentation, and how to deal with things such as weights.

The best way to use this manual is as a reference tool. It is unlikely that you will sit down and read it cover to cover and take away everything you need to know about the data. More realistically, you will start to work with the data and will need some information about certain aspects of the data or the survey – and hopefully you will be able to find it within this manual fairly easily.

This is the July 2008 (fourth) version of the manual. We welcome any feedback you have. It is an evolving manual and is being updated as successive waves are made available to researchers. If there is something that you expected to find in the manual and didn’t, or if you had difficulty finding or understanding any section, please let us know (email hilda-inquiries@unimelb.edu.au).