When the National Center for Health
Statistics (NCHS) collected the data from respondents to the National
Survey of Family Growth (NSFG), those respondents were promised that the
information they provided would be held “strictly confidential.”
The NCHS is legally required to keep that promise. In order to do
so, some variables could not be included on Public Use Files, either because
they pose additional
risk of disclosure or they contain data that would
increase the consequences of disclosure. These items are made available to the
research community in the following data files:
ACASI
Data The NSFG
Cycle 6 questionnaires contained a number of items designed to provide a
comprehensive description of current and past behavior related to the risk
of acquiring sexually transmitted infections (STI), including the Human
Immunodeficiency Virus, or HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. These questions
were asked via Audio Computer-Assisted Self-Interviewing, or ACASI, in which
the respondent hears the question through headphones or reads it from the
laptop screen and enters the answer directly into the computer. The object
of ACASI was to give respondents a more private opportunity to report this
sensitive information.
The ACASI files include
most of the items from the ACASI portion of the NSFG Cycle 6 interview
(female section J and male section K). The series on income and sources of
income were collected in ACASI, but they are included on the Cycle 6 Public
Use Files.
The questions included
in ACASI were largely the same for male and female respondents.
Comparable items were asked about drug use, risk behaviors for sexually
transmitted infections (STI, including HIV), and experience with STI.
Both male and female
respondents were given an opportunity to re-report their experience with
pregnancies or fathering pregnancies that were previously reported
directly to the interviewer.
All adult respondents
(18-44) were asked about non-voluntary sexual intercourse and types of
force they may have experienced, if they reported non-voluntary
intercourse.
While the main
interviewer-administered portion of the NSFG interview was limited to
heterosexual vaginal intercourse, in ACASI all respondents were asked
about other types of sexual activity, including oral and anal sex and
same-sex partners.
The ACASI file data and
documentation are available upon request, and without charge. Please make
your request by email (nsfg@cdc.gov)
or regular mail and provide:
a brief summary, on
your organization’s letterhead, of the proposed use of the ACASI data. (If
you are a student, a faculty advisor should also provide a letter of
support for the proposed research.)
a signed User Agreement, which describes
the specific protections in place at your institution that meet the NCHS
standards for data users. Each user, including research assistants, should
sign the agreement, and these signed agreements should be mailed back to
NSFG staff at the address provided below.
For
additional information or questions about these files, researchers may
contact the NSFG staff directly via mail, e-mail or telephone at:
National Survey of Family Growth
Reproductive Statistics Branch
Division of Vital Statistics
National Center for Health Statistics
3311 Toledo Road, Room 7318
Hyattsville, MD 20782 nsfg@cdc.gov (301)
458-4222
When the NSFG staff has
received your signed user agreement(s), you will be sent the ACASI data and
documentation on CD-ROM.
Interviewer Variables Interviewers'
observations of the interview process and circumstances
are collected in the NSFG. These serve as measures of the respondent's
environment and help assess factors that may affect
data quality. In Cycle 6 of the NSFG, this paper-and-pencil questionnaire
was expanded to include a more complete assessment of these factors. Thedata and documentation are now available for this
file, which contains the responses of over 260 female interviewers, for the
12,571 respondents in the 2002 NSFG. These data are available through
NCHS' Research Data Center (RDC). Please contact NSFG staff at nsfg@cdc.gov
or staff of the RDC at rdca@cdc.gov.
You can find further information at the RDC Website.
Contextual
(Geographic) Data
Contextual or geographic data provide information on the context, or
community, in which respondents live. Geographic data may include
information for the region, state, county, census tract, or block group in
which the respondent lives. A
contextual data file for Cycle 6 is available now for use
by the research community. These
data are only available for use through the NCHS Research Data Center, or RDC, described below.The contextual data for Cycle 6 are drawn from 4 major sources:
The 2000 Census
Summary Files are the source of some contextual data, and many of these
variables are available at the County, Census Tract, and Block Group
levels.
The second source is
the County and City Data Book. This information is available only at the
county level.
The third source is a
file of variables relating to family planning services and the need for
services, all at the county level.
The fourth source is a
file of rates of selected sexually transmitted diseases (STD’s), also at
the county level.
Most of these variables
are available for the respondent’s residence at 2 points in time – the date
of interview in 2002, and at the date of the census, on April 1, 2000.
Researchers can see the
Cycle 5 contextual variable list in a previous NSFG report published
by NCHS in April 2003 (see Vital and Health Statistics Series 23, Number 23,
by Mosher, Deang, and Bramlett, particularly Appendix II).
Researchers may also request
that other variables be added to
existing NSFG files in the NCHS Research Data Center.
For example, a researcher might add state-level variables indicating provisions of a welfare law or a law relating to health care coverage.
(Please contact the NSFG staff for specific instructions). There are
charges for the use of the RDC, which are explained at the
RDC website.
Researchers may also find
useful information for working with NSFG data through the RDC in the Series
23, Number 23 report mentioned above or contact nsfg@cdc.gov.
For more information about using the RDC,visit http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/r&d/rdc.htm.