The Cape Area Panel Study (CAPS) is a longitudinal study of the lives of youths and young adults in metropolitan Cape Town, South Africa. The first wave of the study collected interviews from about 4800 randomly selected young people age 14-22 in August-December, 2002. Wave 1 also collected information on all members of these young people’s households, as well as a random sample of households that did not have members age 14-22. A third of the youth sample was re-interviewed in 2003 (Wave 2a) and the remaining two thirds were re-visited in 2004 (Wave 2b). The full youth sample was then re-interviewed in 2005 (Wave 3), 2006 (Wave 4) and 2009 (Wave 5). Wave 3 includes interviews with approximately 2000 co-resident parents of young adults, while wave 4 also includes interviews with a sample of older adults (all individuals from the original 2002 households who were born on or before 1 January 1956) and all children born to the female young adults. The fifth wave comprises all respondents interviewed in any of the Waves 2a, 3 or 4. In 2010 there were telephonic follow-ups or proxy interviewed that tried to capture those that were not successfully interviewed during the course of the 2009 fieldwork. The study covers a wide range of outcomes, including schooling, employment, health, family formation, and intergenerational support systems. CAPS began in 2002 as a collaborative project of the Population Studies Center in the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan and the Centre for Social Science Research at the University of Cape Town (UCT). Other units involved in subsequent waves include UCT’s Southern African Labour and Development Research Unit and the Research Program in Development Studies at Princeton University. Primary funding is provided by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH). Additional funding has been provided by the Office of AIDS Research, the Fogarty International Center, and the National Institute of Aging of NIH, and by grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to the University of Michigan and the University of Cape Town.
