Integrated Health Interview Series (IHIS)

National Institute of Child Health and Human Development,  (R01 HD46697).   Principal Investigator:  Lynn Blewett; Co-Investigator:   Steven Ruggles.   http://www.ihis.us/

The National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) is one of the longest-running federal surveys and is the principal source for information on the changing health of Americans.  Presently, however, the NHIS is underutilized for the study of long-term change.  The complexities of the survey design and file structures of the existing public use files make the NHIS unwieldy even for analysis of single years; the incompatibilities across survey years—and particularly across survey design periods—make the cost of long-run chronological analysis prohibitive for many researchers.   This project will create an Integrated Health Interview Series (IHIS) comprised of NHIS data and documentation for the period 1963 to 2003.  The IHIS will simplify access to approximately 6,000 variables on over three million respondents contained in over 300 different data files.  It will multiply the value of NHIS data by allowing researchers to make consistent comparisons through four decades of dramatic change in public health, and thus to study the health status of Americans as a dynamic process.