Barriers and Opportunities for Cross-Temporal Analysis with U.S. Health Survey Data: The Integrated Health Interview Series (IHIS) as a Case Study

The public use files of the U.S. National Health Interview Survey (NHIS)cover vital public health topics for every year from the late 1960s to the present. Yet the chronological scope of these data was rarely exploited, due to complex file structure, changes in survey content and variable names, voluminous documentation for each year, and shifts in survey methods. The Integrated Health Interview Series (IHIS) overcomes these problems by providing free harmonized data with on-line documentation addressing comparability issues and an easy-to-use data extraction system. (poster presented at the April 2008 meetings of the Population Association of America)