Add Health

This data set may be a bit harder than some others to use because you need to take data from different years’ data sets, matching on an anonymous person identification number.

The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) is a longitudinal study of a nationally representative sample of adolescents in grades 7-12 in the United States during the 1994-95 school year. The Add Health cohort has been followed into young adulthood with four in-home interviews, the most recent in 2008, when the sample was aged 24-32. Add Health combines longitudinal survey data on respondents’ social, economic, psychological and physical well-being with contextual data on the family, neighborhood, community, school, friendships, peer groups, and romantic relationships, providing unique opportunities to study how social environments and behaviors in adolescence are linked to health and achievement outcomes in young adulthood. The fourth wave of interviews expanded the collection of biological data in Add Health to understand the social, behavioral, and biological linkages in health trajectories as the Add Health cohort ages through adulthood.  The AddHealth website is http://www.cpc.unc.edu/projects/addhealth

The first thing to do is to know what kinds of topics the surveys included.  If you click on Codebooks (top menu), you’ll find a variety of ways to do that.  You can use the Add Health Codebook Explorer (ACE) which is an easy way to browse. Click here for Instructions on how to use the AddHealth Codebook Explorer.  Look through the topics and subtopics, or search for a specific topic that you are interested in.  For instance, one person last year studied how likely a pregnant teenage or twenty-something person was to have an abortion, and what affected this likelihood.

Students who used Add health last year often found that they needed to merge data from several different parts of AddHealth.  But that is not hard to do in Stata.  Megan will help you with this dataset.

Just to get a sense, here are the major topics:

Contextual Data