Administrative data are generally attained from administrative systems, which are typically collected by government agencies for registration, transaction and record keeping or other purposes. With adequate information, such datasets provide the opportunity to construct large panel datasets linking parents and children. One recent example of this is the work of Franz Buscha (University of Westminster) and Patrick Sturgis (University of Southampton) who turn to census data. They south korea rcs data analysed data from the Office for National Statistics Longitudinal Study (ONS LS), which allowed them to link records of individuals and their parents from the five decennial censuses between 1971 and 2011. Using census data represents a step further in social mobility research by providing much bigger samples. comparative social mobility research using harmonised international census data.
While using the census data Buscha and Strugis are still limited to observing class and status mobility, administrative data can also provide an opportunity to observe income mobility. Income mobility is studied in the Scandinavian countries where administrative data is easily accessible. Other countries need to be more creative as such data sources are not readily available.Raj Chetty and colleagues have done impressive work using administrative data for studying social mobility in the US.