ABSTRACT
At the very end of the 20th century, as part of an ongoing longitudinal study of a cohort from the general U.S. population, we collected detailed data on the period of transition from adolescence to adulthood. Narratives from 240 of our Children in the Community study participants described their own role behavior and associated variables in extended telephone interviews and thus created a unique data set describing 120 continuous months covering the years between their 17th and 27th birthdays. For each month, we employed the narrated behavioral descriptions to rate and score approximately a dozen categorical variables and 40 scaled variables. Our primary motivation was to gain knowledge about the connection between growing maturity and the course of mental illness. An additional interest, motivated in part by Sir Michael Rutter's excellent 1996 paper on turning points, was to identify events or time points that represented a distinct break between past and future behavior.
