Understanding Biographical Information

Personal information is personal data that distinguishes one individual from another. The most basic of this information is a person's biographical data, which includes name, address, gender, marital status, and date of birth.

When you manage many individuals in a database, you want to know and quickly access more than the basic information about them. With the personal information data pages, you can also enter and track an individual's various telephone numbers and addresses (street, email, and uniform resource locator [URL]), and you can maintain data about the individual's ethnicity, visa and permits, citizenship and passports, languages, relationships, religious preference, emergency contacts, and work experience.

You can enter and maintain different name types for an individual. With effective dating, you can also maintain and review the history of name changes for each type. For example, when the divorced Mrs. Edith Jones advises your institution that she has remarried and changed her last name to Bramowitz, you can maintain her preferred name, Edith Bramowitz; her former name, Edith Jones; and her maiden name, Edith Brown. Departments that need to know when these name changes occurred can determine that by reviewing the history of each name type.

You can also enter and maintain different address types for an individual. For example, you might want to enter an individual's home, business, mailing, and permanent address. You can update these addresses as needed and maintain the address change history. In addition to traditional addresses, many individuals have at least one email or web address and several telephone numbers. You can enter and review electronic addresses and phone numbers in your system. After you enter addresses data, you can run processes to apply or remove seasonal addresses, update linked addresses, and search for a specific address for an individual.

Use the pages described in this documentation to report personal attributes, including the ethnicity of students, staff, and constituents in your campus community. The United States government requires that students must be placed in at least one of a limited number of ethnic groups.

You can identify the reciprocal individual relationships that your institution wants to track. Reciprocal relationships include spouses, mother and daughter or mother and son, brother and brother or brother and sister, employer and employee, and so on.

You can use reciprocal relationships to associate an individual in your database with another individual inside or outside of your database. When you associate two individuals, you can set up joint communications for them and maintain one joint address to which to send the joint communication. For example, you can set up a joint communication addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Smith.

You can set the system to automatically verify the marital status that you enter on the Biographical Details Data page against the relationship that you select on the Relationships page. To set automatic marital status verification, select the marital status and associated relationship on the Relationship/Marital Status page that you want the system to verify. If the verification determines that the marital status of either individual is not the specified status for that relationship, a warning message appears, suggesting that you update the marital status on the Biographical Details page. For example, if you set the marital status of Married and the relationship of Spouseon the Relationships/Marital Status page, when you select the relationship of Spouse on the Relationships page, the system verifies that the marital status of each individual on the Biographical Details page is Married. If the marital status of either individual is different from Married, the system displays the warning message.

You can track which languages an individual can read, speak, or write and to what degree of proficiency. You can also identify the religious preference, if any, reported by an individual and track the religious preferences of your overall campus community. You can also set preferences for the language and method by which an individual wants to receive communications from your institution.

You can enter the names, addresses, and telephone numbers of people to contact when an individual has an emergency situation. You can enter as many contacts and as many phone numbers for each contact as the individual provides or as your institution requires.

You can use U.S. Standard Industry Classification (SIC) and Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) codes to identify and track data about an individual's work experience, including the name of the individual's former employer, employment begin and end dates, and the most current rate of pay.

You can enter or update most basic biographical data about an individual on the Biographical Details page when you create the personal record, or you can access pages described in this section to edit or update specific information. When you save information on the pages described in this section, the system writes it to the relevant maintenance tables and updates the same information on other pages where it appears, including the Biographical Details page.

When you license PeopleSoft Campus Self Service, you can also present basic biographical information to students and faculty so that they can view and update their own information, which minimizes the need for your staff to enter and maintain the data.