The public-use data sets are currently available for Waves I-V.
The public-use data sets contain all the survey data from In-Home Interviews but only for a subset of the full Add Health sample. We release a smaller sample through the public-use data set to limit deductive disclosure risk. Public-use data doesn’t contain ID numbers of friends, siblings or romantic partners, nor does it contain files on Obesity and Neighborhood Environment, genetics, disposition, political context and alcohol density. These files require a restricted-use contract.
Getting Public-Use Data
Public-use data are available from three sources: Add Health Dataverse hosted by UNC’s Research Data Management Core, the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), and the Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA). Users may obtain the data from any of these sources, depending on their needs.
Add Health Dataverse
Add Health Dataverse is part of UNC Dataverse, a data repository service hosted by UNC Research Data Management Core. The Add Health public-use data is distributed at no charge through AH Dataverse. To download the data, users are required to sign a Dataset Terms form and agree to the Add Health Dataverse terms of use.
ICPSR
The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) distributes the Add Health public-use data at no charge through its Data Sharing for Demographic Research (DSDR) project. Public-use data are available for download from the DSDR website. To download the data, returning users must log in to their MyData account; new users are required to create a MyData account. MyData is the user registration and authentication system for the ICPSR and DSDR websites. The system uses an email address as a login ID and requires a password.
ARDA
The Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA) distributes public-use data at no charge. To download the data, users will be required to agree to the Add Health terms of use.