China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS)
Summary
The China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS) is an NIH-funded study of more than 41,000 households followed for over 35 years, capturing dramatic and rapid modernization- and environment-related changes in individual, household and community environments. The CHNS offers high quality, unique and extraordinary, intergenerational data that capture the interdependent biological, health, social, and environmental factors that affect child development over time and under conditions of enormous environmental change (e.g., the end of the one-child policy, migration of adults to seek work, leaving their children behind with grandparents, and closures of village schools sending children away from their families to attend boarding schools). When the survey began in 1989, researchers used survey questions as the main tool for data collection but have since expanded to include collecting biological measures like blood to assess white blood cell count and cholesterol.
