Version Date: Feb 16, 2011 View help for published
Principal Investigator(s): View help for Principal Investigator(s)
United States Department of Health and Human Services. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. National Center for Health Statistics
Series:
https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR08049.v5
Version V5
The basic purpose of the Health Interview Survey is to obtain information about the amount and distribution of illness, its effects in terms of disability and chronic impairments, and the kind of health services people receive. There are five core files within the 1979 survey, each in a separate data file. The variables in the Household File (Part 1) include type of living quarters, size of family, region, condition list assigned, and type of PSU. The Person File (Part 2) includes information on sex, age, race, marital status, veteran status, education, income, industry and occupation codes, and limits on activity. The Condition File (Part 3) contains information for each reported health condition, with specifics on injury and accident reports. The Hospital Episode File (Part 4) provides information on medical conditions, hospital episodes, type of service, type of hospital ownership, date of admission and discharge, number of nights in hospital, and operations performed. The Doctor Visit File (Part 5) documents doctor visits within the time period and identifies acute or chronic conditions. A sixth and a seventh data set have been added to the core files. The Home Care Supplement File (Part 6) documents basic demographic information, eating habits, in-home mobility, hospital visits, and the extent that basic living activities and needs are performed with or without aid. Also in the Person file are the Home Care Supplement variables which were used to define the need for personal (individual) home care as a result of a chronic health condition, as well as the use of eyeglasses and contact lenses and hearing aids. The Residential Mobility Supplement File (Part 7) includes basic demographic variables and length of hospital stay, amount of time one has lived at the same residence, and reasons for moving.
Export Citation:
Individual identifiers have been removed from the microdata tapes available from the National Center for Health Statistics. Nevertheless, under section 308(d) of the Public Health Service Act (42 U.S.C. 242m), data collected by the National Center for Health Statistics may not be used for any purpose other than for statistical reporting. ICPSR recommends to users that individual elementary unit data contained in this collection be used solely for statistical research.
These data files contain weights, which must be used in any analysis.
Per agreement with the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), ICPSR distributes the data files and text of the technical documentation for this collection as prepared by NCHS.
The Residential Mobility Supplement (Part 7) contains blanks.
A multistage probability sample was used in selecting housing units.
Civilian, noninstitutionalized population of the United States and the District of Columbia from 1,900 geographically defined Primary Sampling Units (PSU).
personal interviews
1984-05-03
2011-02-16 SAS, SPSS, and Stata setup files have been added. Some corresponding documentation has been updated and pre-existing data files have been replaced. The Codebook and Frequency documentation has been removed from the sixth and eighth datasets and can now be found with all other corresponding and added documentation.
2006-01-12 All files were removed from dataset 9 and flagged as study-level files, so that they will accompany all downloads.
1984-05-03 ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection:
These data contain multiple weight variables for each part. Users should refer to the User Guide for further information regarding the weights and their derivation. Additionally, users may need to weight the data prior to analysis.
HideThe public-use data files in this collection are available for access by the general public. Access does not require affiliation with an ICPSR member institution.
This study is maintained and distributed by the National Archive of Computerized Data on Aging (NACDA), the aging program within ICPSR. NACDA is sponsored by the National Institute on Aging (NIA) at the National Institutes of Heath (NIH).
