The Project TALENT Data Bank is a series of 55 machine-readable data files (MRDF) that resulted from a longitudinal study of selected United States high school students in grades 9 through 12 during 1960. Project TALENT was designed to investigate the personal, educational, and experiential factors that promote or inhibit the development of human talents. Data on cognitive skills, interests, plans, family background, and activities were collected from a national probability sample of high school students. Follow-up surveys conducted 1, 5, and 11 years after graduation produced data regarding the individual's post-high school education and work experiences, family development, plans and aspirations, and life satisfaction. Extensive data were obtained in 1960 from a sample of approximately 400,000 students from 1,225 selected junior and senior high schools who were given a 2-day battery of tests and inventories. The complete Project TALENT Data Bank consists of 28 files containing the basic 1960 data; 2 files containing data on participants first tested in the 9th grade and then again in the 12th grade; 24 files containing responses to follow-up surveys; and a single file containing characteristics of the high schools involved. Each record on the follow-up files represents a respondent to that survey and includes all previously collected information for that respondent. The basic 1960 data is based on the national probability sample of 375,122 high school students selected to be representative of all 9th-, 10th-, 11th-, and 12th-grade students in the country. The 1960 testing included nearly all 15-year-olds in the areas served by 10% of the participating school districts (most of whom were also in the high school probability sample). A "saturation sample" consisting of nearly every student in Knox County, Tennessee, in grades 8-12 was included in the 1960 data (along with a number of other small groups) thereby adding an additional 34,360 cases to the file. Each grade cohort in the high school probability sample was followed up 1, 5, and 11 years after their high school graduation, resulting in the 24 follow-up data files. A special subfile, the "Project TALENT Public Use File, 1960-1976" (ICPSR-7823), contains data from a subsample of 4,000 original participants (1,000 men and women from each of the high school classes of 1960-1963), all of whom had responded to the 11-year follow-up survey (see TM 870 795). An additional follow-up file was generated by retesting, in a 10% sample of TALENT schools, all students who were in the 12th grade as of 1963 (and who were therefore mostly in the 9th grade in 1960). Variables from the 1960 student data include: scores on information tests, ability tests and achievement tests; dispositional trait data from the Preference Test, Student Activity Inventory, and Interest Inventory; family and personal background related to education, health, social activities, and economic status; and college, military, career, and marital plans. Variables from the follow-up surveys contain data on educational experiences (including degrees, grades, and financial support); career plans, work experience, and job satisfaction; and personal matters regarding health, marital status, race, religion, number of children, military experience, geographical mobility, leisure and civic activities, quality of life, decisions regretted, and discrimination experienced. TYPE OF SURVEY: National Probability Survey; Follow-up Survey; Longitudinal Survey. POPULATION: High school students from the classes of 1960-1963. RESPONDENTS: Selected high school students in grades 9-12 in the Spring of 1960. FREQUENCY OF SURVEY: Periodic. YEAR OF FIRST DATA: 1960. (CDM/WTB)