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The Multicity Study of the Impact of Taxes on Sugar-Sweetened Beverages was a multi-year study intended to provide comprehensive information about the impacts of sugar-sweetened beverage taxes on retail prices, purchases, and consumption. The study was conducted in two cities that recently implemented an excise tax on sugar-sweetened beverages: Philadelphia, PA and Oakland, CA.

The study consists of six datasets, with three datasets covering Philadelphia and three covering Oakland. The store observation data contain price information for sodas, juices, and other beverages. The purchase datasets contain information from survey questions fielded at stores, including basic demographic information (race and ethnicity, gender, income), the number of people in the participant's household, and how often they shop for beverages at that store and others. The household datasets contain information from survey questions fielded during the household beverages consumption survey; it includes demographic information and beverage consumption information for a household adult and a household child.

The study also included an analysis of strategic responses to the taxes, including cross-border shopping by consumers, and retailers changing the availability of various beverages.

This repeated cross-sectional national telephone survey of households was conducted as part of the evaluation of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Urban Health Initiative (UHI), a long-term effort to improve the health, safety, and well-being of children and youth in five economically distressed cities in the United States: Baltimore, MD, Detroit, MI, Oakland, CA, Philadelphia, PA, and Richmond, VA. The UHI Survey of Adults and Youth (SAY) included a variety of questions, asked of both parents and their 10-18 year old children, regarding children's health, safety, perceptions of neighborhoods and schools, family relations, quality of city services, and other issues. SAY surveyed 3 types of households -- households without children, households with children aged 0-9 years, and households with children aged 10-18 years -- in up to 14 geographic areas, including the 5 UHI program cities, 9 comparison cities demographically similar to the UHI cities, the suburban regions of these cities, the most populous 100 United States cities, and the rest of the country. There were 3 waves of SAY fielded during the course of the UHI project: during the 1998-1999, 2001-2002, and 2004-2005 school years.

The vast majority of survey items in SAY are from other national surveys, including the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, the Youth Risk Behavior Survey, and the National Health Interview Survey. The survey instrument was revised between waves, but about 50 percent of the instrument remained the same across all 3 waves. All adult respondents (both parents and nonparents) were first asked questions about services and general conditions in their city. Parents were then asked additional questions about their children, their children's schools, child-related services in their communities, neighborhood and city conditions, and brief question segments about randomly selected children in various age groups. If one or more 10-18 year olds lived in the household, and if the parent respondent gave permission, up to two 10-18 year olds in the household were then interviewed about their schools, neighborhoods, peer group activities and behaviors, out-of-school time, relations with adults, and other topics.

There is a separate data file for each wave, and each record contains all of the data for a given household, i.e., the data collected from one adult and up to two 10-18 year olds.