Former Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.) and Mary Sue Coleman pen blog entry for The Hill which stresses the importance of research funded by the federal government. They describe the groundbreaking research studies which received the 2016 Golden Goose Award, including the Add Health study. Read the full story here.
Holt is the Chief Executive Officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and Coleman is president of the Association of American Universities.
Check out the October 2016 issue of the Journal of Adolescent Health to read two articles featuring Add Health research:
The Association Between Adolescent Obesity and Disability Incidence in Young Adulthood
Infant health & characteristics in Add Health
Add Health data include a variety of infant health measures for two generations: Add Health respondents and respondents’ biological children. Add Health respondent birth characteristics were reported by the Add Health respondent’s parents while the Add Health respondents provided information on birth characteristics of their own biological children. Information on prenatal care, gestational age, birth weight and breastfeeding are included in the Add Health datasets.
Current data collection efforts for Add Health Wave V and the Add Health Parent Study include survey questions concerning the pregnancy and birth of the Add Health respondents and their biological children. Please refer to the study webpages for more information on ongoing data collection: Add Health Wave V, Add Health Parent Study
This research highlight focuses on infant health as part of World Breastfeeding Week, which is August 1-7, 2016. Add Health twitter will feature research on infant health and characteristics throughout the month of August so stay tuned!
Publications
To date, Add Health researchers have published 75 journal articles, conference papers/proceedings and theses concerning pregnancy and birth characteristics. To view a full list of publications on breastfeeding, birth weight and gestational age, please click here. These publications are all included in our database of over 6,000 references.
Measures
Below are brief descriptions of measures collected at previous waves which are available in existing datasets, as well as information on measures which are collected during ongoing fieldwork. Variable names provided in parenthesis hyperlink to the corresponding ACE online codebook page for the variable.
Prenatal care
Respondents were asked about prenatal care obtained for their biological children during Waves III and IV. The Wave III interview included several questions about the respondent’s or partner’s visits to a doctor or nurse-midwife for prenatal care or pregnancy checkups (H3PG11, H3PG13, H3PG14, H3PG15, H3PG16). Wave IV data also includes measures on prenatal care and pregnancy checkups (H4PG12, H4PG13).
Gestational Age
Currently available data on gestational age refer to the respondent’s biological children. During the Wave III in-home interview, respondents were asked whether their biological child was born before 40 weeks (H3LB7) and if so, how many weeks early the child was born (H3LB8). During the Wave IV in-home interview, respondents were asked how many weeks or days before or after the due date their child was born (H4LB9W, H4LB9D). For the first time in Add Health, the Wave V and Parent Study surveys are collecting data on whether the Add Health respondent was born preterm.
Birth weight
Add Health data includes measures for the respondent’s birth weight as well as the birth weight of the respondent’s biological children. At Wave I, the respondent’s parent was asked to provide the respondent’s birth weight in pounds and ounces (PC19A_P/PC19B_O), while Add Health respondents were asked for the birth weight of each of their biological children at Waves III and IV (H3LB5A/H3LB5B, H4LB6P/H4LB6O). At Wave IV, if the respondent did not know the birth weight in pounds and ounces they received a follow up question asking if the baby weighed less than 5.5 pounds (H4LB7).
The Add Health Wave V survey asks respondents to report the birth weight of their biological children while both the Wave V and Parent Study surveys include questions concerning the Add Health respondent’s birth weight. Respondents are asked to self-report their birth weight for the first time during Wave V and the project plans to link administrative data from birth records, including birth weight, to the longitudinal record of a subset of Add Health respondents.
Breastfeeding
During the Wave I parent interview, parents reported the length of time the Add Health respondent was breastfed (PC20).
In a special edition of the ICPSR Bulletin, ICPSR announced that both winners of their 2016 Research Paper Competition used Add Health data in their analyses.
The winner of the Master’s competition, Brielle Bryan, found that adolescents whose fathers were recently incarcerated have more disadvantaged social networks. This means the adolescents feel isolated, have less friends, and are connected with more delinquent friends and less academically successful peers. Brielle is a doctoral student at Harvard University, and her paper is entitled “Parental Incarceration and Adolescent Social Network Disadvantage.”
Candace M. Evans, of McMurry University, won the Undergraduate competition for her paper entitled “The Moderating Effects of Race and Ethnicity on the Relationship between Body Image and Psychological Well-Being.” This paper showed that the link between body image and self-esteem differed depending on racial/ethnic group. For example, Latinas had lower self-esteem than whites and blacks when they felt they were underweight or overweight.
Read the official announcement and access the full papers on ICPSR’s website. Information on entering the 2017 competition is also available.
You may also download the Add Health public use data from ICPSR.
Using data from Add Health, researchers Donaldson, Handren and Crano examined the relationship between teens and their parents and parental effect on teenage drinking. Teens with parents who were more supportive and monitored their children were less likely to binge drink. Parental protection from teenage binge drinking may also protect against future criminal behavior, as binge drinking was shown to be predictive of future arrests.
NPR Excerpt:
The study suggests that parents do make a difference. “Parental monitoring and warmth are a protective device against kids’ binge drinking,” says Crano. But the two need to go hand in hand. “If you have surveillance without warmth, you’ve got a problem,” he adds. “You want the relationship between a parent and a child to be close enough and warm enough that the child discloses behaviors and what they are thinking, and the parent can offer advice” that reinforces rules but doesn’t disparage the child.
Read the full story on NPR.
Scholarly Source: Donaldson CD, Handren LM, Crano WD. The Enduring Impact of Parents’ Monitoring, Warmth, Expectancies, and Alcohol Use on Their Children’s Future Binge Drinking and Arrests: a Longitudinal Analysis. Prev Sci (2016) 17:606. doi:10.1007/s11121-016-0656-1. Article available online.
Summary: Using Add Health data, researchers Anthony Paik, Kenneth J. Sanchagrin and Karen Heimer examined the sexual and reproductive health of young women who take purity pledges to remain abstinent until marriage. They found that most young women break their pledges, and that when they do, those pledge breakers are more likely than their peers to contract HPV or experience nonmarital pregnancy.
Read the story from The Atlantic: The Unintended Consequences of Purity Pledges.
Excerpt:
“The results showed that women who did or did not take abstinence pledges were equally likely to get HPV—about 27 percent of each group would eventually contract the virus, which causes genital warts. Among women who had multiple sexual partners, however, pledge breakers were more likely to get HPV.
The results were even more striking for out-of-wedlock pregnancy: About 18 percent of the girls who had never taken virginity pledges became pregnant within six years after they began having sex. Meanwhile, 30 percent of those who had taken a pledge—and broken it—got pregnant while not married.
…….
‘Our research indicates that abstinence pledging can have unintended negative consequences by increasing the likelihood of HPV and non-marital pregnancies, the majority of which are unintended,” Paik said in a statement. “Abstinence-only sex education policy is widespread at the state and local levels and may return at the federal level, and this policy approach may be contributing to the decreased sexual and reproductive health of girls and young women.'”
Scholarly Source: Paik A, Sanchagrin KJ, Heimer K. Broken Promises: Abstinence Pledging and Sexual and Reproductive Health. Journal of Marriage and Family 2016; 78 (2): 546-561. doi: 10.1111/jomf.12279. Article available online.
Drs. Peter Bearman, Barbara Entwisle, Kathleen Mullan Harris, Ronald Rindfuss, and Richard Udry were awarded the 2016 Golden Goose Award for their work in developing the Add Health study. The Golden Goose award aims to “recognize the tremendous human and economic benefits of federally funded research by highlighting examples of seemingly obscure studies that have led to major breakthroughs and resulted in significant societal impact.”
In the award announcement, Add Health is described as “a landmark example of how longitudinal research can yield extraordinary and unexpected insights.” The study’s importance is further described in the following excerpt:
The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health—Add Health, for short—is a gold standard basic research study on human health, funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which has had profound impacts on society and helped shape the national conversation around adolescent health. With its revolutionary open-access model – nearly all of the survey data is publicly available as soon as it has been collected and processed – it has made possible an enormous range of scientific studies that have strengthened our understanding of the importance of family connectedness to adolescent health, allowed us to track and scrutinize the rising tide of the obesity epidemic, and demonstrated the social, behavioral, and biological importance of adolescence to lifelong health and well-being.
Everyone at Add Health would like to thank the Golden Goose Award committee and extend heartfelt congratulations to the winners of the award!
This year’s award winners received their Golden Goose statues at the September 22, 2016 ceremony held at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. 2016 awardees also included the researchers leading The Honeybee Algorithm and Sex Life of the Screwworm Fly studies.
Drs Barbara Entwisle (L) and Kathleen Mullan Harris (R) with their Golden Goose statues at the Library of Congress.
Click here to watch the Golden Goose Award 2016 documentary video.
Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, a research team led by Cari Jo Clark at the University of Minnesota examined both victimization and perpetration of intimate partner violence (IPV) among young adults, aged 18-28. Then they examined cardiovascular risk factors in the same respondents when they were adults between the ages of 24-34. Risk factors included age, sex, blood pressure, smoking, diabetes, BMI, and use of antihypertensive medication.
Analyses showed that about 40% of the sample had been exposed to IPV in adolescence and young adulthood; these individuals were more likely than those with no IPV exposure to have a cardiovascular disease event in later adulthood. Researchers propose that a number of mechanisms may be involved with this increased risk, including a link between IPV, unhealthy lifestyle behaviors, and depression. Early stress is also tied to altered functioning of the body’s stress and metabolic systems. The authors encourage health providers to increase awareness about the occurrence and risks of IPV.
View the abstract or download the complete article from Preventative Medicine
Authors:
Add Health has been ranked as ICPSR’s top downloaded study from January 1 – June 1, 2018. According to ICPSR user statistics, the public use data have been accessed more than 2,700 times by more than 2,400 unique users during the first half of 2018.
Add Health public use datasets, documentation files, and codebooks are available via ICPSR, the Odum Institute Dataverse Network, and Sociometrics.
Maelstrom Research at McGill University has incorporated Add Health public-use data into a searchable metadata catalogue that will facilitate the identification of constructs and measures common across longitudinal studies of aging worldwide.
Maelstrom hosts an associated harmonization platform that assists in developing ways to create commensurate measures in situations where the specific variables collected differ across different studies.
Add Health public-use data is now harmonized across all four waves and variables can be compared to other longitudinal study measures by searching the Maelstrom repository.
The Add Health study profile is available on the Maelstrom Research website:
https://www.maelstrom-research.org/mica/study/add-health
At the bottom of the page, the interaction tool allows users to browse Add Health data by standardized topics Maelstrom uses across all studies.
