Sociology 699J: Surveys in Developing Countries

The Malaysian Family Life Surveys

The MFLS-1 sample consists of 1,262 households with an ever-married woman located in 52 communities that were selected to be representative of Peninsular Malaysia in 1976. MFLS-2 reinterviewed 926 of those MFLS-1 households (the "Panel" sample) and a subset of adult children from those original households (the "Children" sample). MFLS-2 also interviewed a new sample of 2,184 women age 18-49, regardless of marital status (the "New" sample), as well as a sample of 1,357 older Malaysians, age 50 and above (the "Senior" sample--the first representative sample of the older population in Peninsular Malaysia). The New and Senior data were drawn from 398 communities representative of Peninsular Malaysia in 1988.

The data from MFLS-1 and MFLS-2 have been widely used by researchers in Malaysia and throughout the world. Many of the innovative features of these surveys have been emulated in surveys conducted by the World Bank, the Demographic and Health Surveys program, and others. MFLS-1 and MFLS-2 have been the source of data for over 200 journal articles, papers, and book chapters and 50 theses and dissertations.

Documentation of MFLS-1 includes:

• description of survey instruments including copies of the questionnaires
• Codebook introduction and descriptions of MF1 to MF6 data
• descriptions of MF7 to MF11 data plus appendices
• MFLS1 subfile documentation (MR-111) and individual-level file documentation (N=1815)
• the summary report and the field and technical report
• the description of the sample communities

Documentation of MFLS-2 includes:

• Questionnaires
• Codebook, Part 1
• Codebook, Part 2
• Codebook, Part 3
• User's Guide and technical report
• Report Appendices

The web pages for the MFLS are: http://www.rand.org/labor/FLS/MFLS/

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