National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) Wave II, 1996

The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) is a longitudinal study of a nationally representative sample of adolescents in grades 7-12 in the United States during the 1994-95 school year. The Add Health cohort has been followed into young adulthood with four in-home interviews, the most recent in 2008, when the sample was aged 24-32*. Add Health combines longitudinal survey data on respondents’ social, economic, psychological and physical well-being with contextual data on the family, neighborhood, community, school, friendships, peer groups, and romantic relationships, providing unique opportunities to study how social environments and behaviors in adolescence are linked to health and achievement outcomes in young adulthood. The fourth wave of interviews expanded the collection of biological data in Add Health to understand the social, behavioral, and biological linkages in health trajectories as the Add Health cohort ages through adulthood.
<br/><br/> <b>Wave II</b> <br/> The public use dataset for Wave II contains information collected in 1996 from Add Health’s nationally representative sample of adolescents. Of the 6,504 Wave I public use respondents, 4,834 were interviewed at Wave II. The Wave II in-home interview was generally similar to that at Wave I. Questions about sun exposure and more detailed nutrition questions were added. Questions about attributes that should not change, such as ethnic background, were not repeated. P
hysical and functional limitations questions were omitted because the disabled sample was not re-interviewed. Respondents reported their height and weight during the course of the interview and were actually weighed and measured by the interviewer.
<br/><br/> <br/> *17 respondents in the Wave IV public use sample were 33 years old at the time of the interview.