Child base from EDP

The permanent demographic sample (EDP) is a panel of individuals for whom INSEE collects information every year from different statistical sources, such as civil status records since 1967, population censuses since 1968 and socio-fiscal data since 2011. The individuals tracked (4% of the population), both adults and children, are those born on 16 specific days of the year.

A children’s database has been set up as part of LifeObs using the EDP, vintage 2019.

There are three advantages to tracking children using administrative data, which is still relatively underdeveloped:

• attrition is more limited than in survey data, because children are tracked even if they move house, which is vital for analysing the consequences of separation.
• this makes it possible to have large sample sizes and to observe situations that are too rare to be captured in surveys.
• it makes it possible to track children in alternating residence in each of the new households.

The 2019 EDP database contains information on 3.7 million individuals. Among them, 752,599 EDP children residing in mainland France (observed at least once during their minority since 2011) are tracked and matched with socio-fiscal data, via known information on parents. The EDP data is used to reconstruct the child’s family configuration, standard of living and housing conditions. The child’s ‘tax residence’ is shown on the tax return: he or she may be declared as living mainly with the mother, the father or in alternating residence.

The technical note available in the download box describes how the children’s database was constructed from the 2019 vintage EDP, presenting the construction of the variables and the associated Stata codes.

Carole Bonnet and Anne Solaz, Research Directors at INED, have published an article based on their analysis of the children’s EDP database : Carole Bonnet and Anne Solaz, Séparation des parents : un risque accru de pauvreté pour les enfants, 2023, Population et Sociétés, n° 610, https://doi.org/10.3917/popsoc.610.0001