Late last week I received the exemption letter and downloaded the dataset for NLSY79 from the NLS Investigator.
Next step: familiarize myself with the sampling codes for R (an open-source statistical package similar to S-Plus). I wish R had been around when I was in grad school, because in several ways it’s simpler than either SAS or SPSS. Any loss of speed is largely irrelevant to those of us who do piddling social-science statistics. I’ve used R for a few pilot things, but this and another project I need to finish up will be the first two projects I’ll be using R for in a more intensive way, and it’s time to brush up on a new language.