Add Health: The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health
- Longitudinal study designed to explore health and health-related behaviors of adolescents and their outcomes
- Funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) with co-funding from 23 other federal agencies and foundations
- Data collection began with a nationally representative sample in the 1994–95 school year
- Over 20,000 adolescents in grades 7–12
- Five waves of data collection
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- Data was collected from both parents and adolescents and included information about many aspects of the adolescents’ health and lives, for example:
- Demographic variables, including socioeconomic data
- Data about the adolescents’ social and family life
- Behavioral, psychosocial, cognitive, and health survey data
- Contextual data from participants’ schools and neighborhoods
- Biological data such as genetic markers, blood-based assays, and medications
- Click here for more information about the study design.
- Click here to access the Add Health Codebook Explorer.
- Click here to review publications that used Add Health data.
Add Health data are available in two forms, public-use and restricted-use.
Public-Use Data
- Public-use data sets are currently available for Waves I-IV only.
- All survey data from the in-home interviews are available.
- To limit deductive disclosure, a reduced sample of other data is available.
- To download
- A restricted-use contract is required to access ID numbers of friends, siblings or romantic partners, or data on obesity, the neighborhood environment, genetics, disposition, political context and alcohol density.
Restricted-Use Data
- Restricted-use data sets are available by contractual agreement.
- They contain data for all study participants and will be distributed only to certified researchers who commit themselves to maintaining limited access.
- To be eligible to enter into a contract, researchers must have an IRB-approved security plan for handling and storing sensitive data and sign a data-use contract agreeing to keep the data confidential.
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