DataSet

National Institute on Aging (NIA)

NSFH

Interview of all surviving members of the original sample via face-to-face personal interview. Personal interview with the current spouse or cohabiting partner almost identical to the interview with the main respondent. Personal interview with the original spouse or partner of the primary respondent in cases where the relationship has ended. Telephone interview with "focal children" who were originally 13-18. Short telephone interview with children who were originally age 5-12. Short proxy interviews with a surviving spouse or other relative in cases where the original respondent has died or is too ill to interview A telephone interview with a randomly selected parent of the main respondent Oversamples: Blacks, 9.2%; Mexican-Americans, 2.4%; Puerto Ricans, 0.7%

Data Collection; Databases; Factual; Family; Interviews; Questionnaires; Reproducibility of Results; Socioeconomic Factors;

The NSFH was designed to provide a broad range of information on family life to serve as a resource for research across disciplinary perspectives. A considerable amount of life-history information was collected, including: the respondent's family living arrangements in childhood, departures and returns to the parental home, and histories of marriage, cohabitation, education, fertility, and employment. The design permits the detailed description of past and current living arrangements and other characteristics and experiences, as well as the analysis of the consequences of earlier patterns on current states, marital and parenting relationships, kin contact, and economic and psychological well-being. Interviews wwere conducted in 1987-88, 1992-94, and 2001-2003.

The previously mentioned web site also contains an extensive bibliography of publications using NSFH data.

Institute for Survey Research
National Institute of Child Health and Human Development(NICHD)
Temple University

The data set is freely available by FTP (contact: NSFHHELP@SSC.WISC.EDU for further information.). Extensive information about the content and availability of the data can be found at the following website: http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/nsfh/home.htm.

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