The Integrated Health Interview Series: Building an NHIS cross-sectional time series from 1963-present

The Integrated Health Interview Series (IHIS) is a five-year NICHD-funded collaboration between the School of Public Health and the Minnesota Population Center at the University of Minnesota to harmonize, document, and disseminate data from the National Health Interview Survey for the period from 1963 to the present. The IHIS builds on the model of the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (see www.ipums.org) which spurred substantial new research based on harmonized microdata of the U.S. census from 1850-2000. The IHIS will enhance the value of NHIS data and promote new research by allowing researchers to make consistent comparisons across four decades of dramatic change in public health, and thus to study the health status of Americans as a dynamic process. The public-use NHIS files are presently restricted to the period from 1969 forward. Thus, in addition to harmonizing, documenting, and disseminating the currently available public use files of the NHIS, we propose to extend the time series backward by working in conjunction with NHIS staff to create new public-use files for NHIS data prior to 1969.