Harmonizing Two NICHD-funded Datasets to Study Youths' Behavioral Health, United States, 1986-2016

The primary purpose of this project was to harmonize a scale of behavioral health, the Behavior Problems Index (BPI), within and across two publicly-available datasets, the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth Children and Young Adults 1979 (NLSY79) and the Child Development Supplements of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID-CDS). Each of the original studies followed children longitudinally and their mothers completed the BPI about their behaviors, generally when the children were ages 4 to 14. The analysis generated Stata-formatted datasets which include the children's ages, genders, race/ethnicities; their mothers' age, highest grade completed, and region and urbanicity of residence; their family size, income, income-to-needs ratio, and poverty status; and the BPI item responses and study-created BPI summary scores. Researchers used naming conventions and recodings to conceptually harmonize these variables. For researchers who want to review and modify the codings, the archive includes the Stata code that was used to create the analysis datasets as well as the "raw" data that was extracted from the NLSY79 and PSID-CDS websites. Researchers also analytically harmonized the BPI scale scores using psychometric models. Here, they provide Mplus code that was used to test for measurement invariance and to run the alignment model to link scores as well as R code using user-written harmony package to read the alignment model output. Research reported in this publication was supported by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) of the National Institutes of Health. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.