National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) Wave IV, 2008

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 IV</b> <br/> Wave IV was designed to study the developmental and health trajectories across the life course of adolescence into young adulthood. Taking place in 2008, approximately 92.5% of the original Wave I respondents were located and 80.3% of eligible cases were interviewed. The Wave IV public use file contains data on 5,114 respondents, aged 24 to 32*. In Wave IV, biological data was also gathered in an attempt to acquire a greater understanding of predisease pathway
s, with a specific focus on obesity, stress, and health risk behavior.
<br/><br/> The Wave IV public use dataset includes the following data files: <ul> <li>Wave IV In-home Interview File: variables from the in-home interview, including anthropometric measures</li> <li>Relationship Data</li> <li>Pregnancy Table File</li> <li>Live Births File</li> <li>Children and Parenting File</li> <li>Wave IV Weights</li> <li>Wave IV Public Use Biomarkers, Glucose Data</li> <li>Wave IV Public Use Biomarkers, Measures of EBV and hsCRP</li> <li>Wave IV Public Use Biomarkers, Lipids
Data</li> </ul> <br/> *17 respondents in the Wave IV public use sample were 33 years old at the time of the interview.