Lauris Olson
Librarian & Coordinator, Social Sciences Collections
As the Penn Libraries' social sciences bibliographer - now coordinator for social sciences collections - since 1998, Lauris is responsible for selecting books, journals, electronic resources, and other media supporting Penn research and instruction in sociology, economics, linguistics, criminology, communication, and related fields. Lauris is Penn's Official Representative to the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research and the contact person for the Penn Libraries' Pennsylvania State Data Center affiliate membership. Lauris coordinates collection development and management activities of subject librarians for anthropology & archaeology, business, education, gender, women's studies & sexuality, political science & international relations, psychology, and social policy & practice/social work. Lauris is also the Penn Libraries' African studies bibliographer. Lauris started at the Penn Libraries in 1991 as a Van Pelt Library reference librarian, but Lauris's presence at Penn began in 1975 as an undergraduate, earning BA and MA degrees in Anthropology here, alongside a Drexel library degree.
Consumer Pyramids Household Survey, produced by the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), is the world's largest household panel survey, a continuous survey of more than 174,000 households in India. CPHS revisits its entire sample in three four-month waves each year, permitting longitudinal analysis starting in January 2014. Overall, CPHS aims to get a sense of the economic well-being of households in India and changes in their well-being over time.
CMIE's CPdx website provides downloadable public-use microdata datasets - anonymized individual questionnaire responses - for each wave of CPHS's four components:
- People of Indiadx : 71 variables covering identity (gender, age, marital status, education, state of origin, religion, caste, and migration), employment (labor status, type of worker, occupation, and industry), health (health status, medication and hospitalization), financial inclusion (access to bank accounts, credit cards, health insurance, and mobile phones), and time use for work and leisure.
- Aspirational Indiadx : 311 variables covering household wealth (assets, investments, and debt), amenities, and consumer sentiments.
- Income Pyramidsdx, 68 variables covering monthly household and household-member income and its composition by sources.
- Consumption Pyramidsdx, 249 variables reporting monthly household expenditures (153 categories of consumables) and weekly household expenditures (27 categories).
CPdx provides each wave's microdata datasets in multiple formats : Stata, SPSS, SAS, R, comma-delimited CSV text, and fixed-field text. The datasets are very large. Each four-month wave of People of Indiadx averages 636,763 responses for a total count of 12,735,252 responses over 20 waves (January 2014-August 2020). Monthly household-member Income Pyramidsdx datasets count an average of 631,289 responses.
An interactive codebook, or description of indicators, is provided on the CPdx website, along with the CPHS questionnaire, and documentation on survey design, sample survival, weighting, and survey execution.
The Penn Libraries' initial Consumer Pyramidsdx subscription has been partially supported with a grant from the Christopher H. Browne Center for International Politics.
