Nov 17, 2015

Data from the Add Health study is now available for researchers to access via Dataverse.

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 fifth wave of data collection will begin in early 2016 and data for Wave V will become available in 2019.

Add Health is now part of UNC’s Dataverse collection , hosted by The Odum Institute. Dataverse is a “federated” system in which data are archived and preserved at multiple institutions worldwide, ensuring long-term access to the data.

If you are interested in data not available in the public-use datasets, please see our restricted-use data page for information about the contract application process. 

The online data file crosswalk provides a comparison of the contents of the public-use and restricted-use files.

For additional information please contact Ashley Sorgi (sorgia@email.unc.edu)