Add Health


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

.                     

  • 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
    • Click here for Wave I, 1994–95 data.
    • Click here for Wave II, 1995–96 data.
    • Click here for Wave III, 2001–02 data.
    • Click here for Wave IV, 2008–09 data.
  • 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.

Return to Secondary Data Homepage