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, and is produced by the Carolina Population Center (CPC) at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). Please refer to the Add Health Project site for a list of funders.
The Add Health cohort (ICPSR study 21600) 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 re-interviewed cohort members in a Wave V follow-up from 2016-2018 to collect social, environmental, behavioral, and biological data with which to track the emergence of chronic disease as the cohort moves through their fourth decade of life.
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, and the fifth wave of data collection continues this biological data expansion.
Add Health Parent Study (2015-2017) (ICPSR study 37375), gathered social, behavioral, and health survey data in 2015-2017 on a probability sample of the Add Health parents who were originally interviewed in 1995. Data for 2,013 Wave I parents, ranging in age from 50-80 years and representing 2,244 Add Health sample members, are available. Additionally, 988 current spouse/partner interviews are available.
Public-use Add Health data can be downloaded directly from the study pages at ICPSR. Users can find out more about the availability of Restricted-use data by visiting the page for ICPSR study 35249.
A data guide for the Add Health Public data is provided by DSDR.
Related publications are available through the ICPSR Bibliography of Data-related Literature and the Add Health Publications Web site.
Additional information on the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) series can be found on the Add Health Web site.