Add Health

For further information about the study, please see the Add Health Website.

For further information about the data, please see the Add Health codebooks.

Public-Use Data consists of one-half of the core sample, and one-half of the oversample of African-American adolescents with a parent who has a college degree, chosen at random. Public-Use Data is available for Waves I-V.

Restricted-Use Data may be accessed by contract only. Contracts may be issued to certified researchers, both within and outside the United States, who commit themselves to maintaining limited access.

There is no fee required to obtain a restricted-use contract.

Applicants for a Restricted-Use Contract must hold a terminal degree in their field and be a faculty member at an academic institution or an employee of a recognized research organization or government agency. PhD candidates are ineligible to apply for their own contract, but they may be added to the contract of a mentor or other faculty member. PhD students may apply on behalf of that faculty member by checking the box that states "I am submitting this request on behalf of the Principal Investigator" at the bottom of the submission form.

With the release of Wave VI, contracts are now valid for five years. Obtaining access to Add Health restricted-use data is done through one of two options below. Older contracts must switch to one of these two options to access any additional data not already in their possession, including both Wave VI and previously released data sets. To make the switch from an older contract to one of the new options, click the Renew Contract button below.

1. Access the data on UNC's Secure Research Workspace (SRW)
2. Access the data on a system that meets specified security requirements at the researcher's Home Institution.

The UNC SRW is the Secure Research Workspace (SRW) hosted by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's (UNC) Research Computing division. The UNC SRW provides a digital collaborative environment for teams of researchers to work with regulated data. The platform supports many projects working with a variety of data sensitivity levels and computational needs. The system adheres to UNC's Information Security Controls Standard at the High protection obligation level and the NIST 800-53 System Security Plan. The user experience in the UNC SRW is via remote desktop, using the Omnissa Horizon client. Both the UNC SRW and the Horizon client will be provided to Add Health researchers free of charge, as will most statistical software applications (e.g., SAS, Stata, R, MPlus, MatLab).

If the SRW does not meet your needs, you will want to consider applying for a Home Institution Contract. To establish a Home Institution Contract, an institutional or departmental IT unit must configure a secure compute server and sign a separate Restricted-Use Data Hosting Agreement with Add Health. This agreement ensures a secure environment and controlled access for approved researchers. Once in place, other researchers within the institution may apply for a Home Institution Contract to access the shared system. The Home Institution Contract functions as a Data Use Agreement, binding researchers to Add Health's data use policies.

For more detailed information about each of these options, including a list of institutions with which Add Health currently has signed Restricted-Use Data Hosting Agreements, please go to the Restricted-Use Contract Options page.

Researchers who have not previously served as the Principal Investigator (PI) on an Add Health Restricted-Use Contract should initiate the application process by following the link provided. This includes those who may have participated in a Restricted-Use Contract or served as a PI on a research project utilizing Add Health data but have not held the role of PI on the contract itself. PhD candidates are ineligible to apply for their own contract.

Principal Investigators with an expired Restricted-Use Contract, or who have a current contract that houses and accesses the restricted-use data in a different way than the two options listed above can click the link to the left to renew their contract.

Researchers operating under legacy contracts that permit local storage of Add Health restricted-use data, including on physical media, must attest to the destruction of all such data before the renewal process can be completed. Local storage includes hard drives, stand-alone computers, file servers, and remote computing servers.