The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, also known as Add Health, is a multiwave

longitudinal study A longitudinal study (or longitudinal survey, or panel study) is a research design that involves repeated observations of the same variables (e.g., people) over short or long periods of time (i.e., uses longitudinal data). It is often a type of ob ...

of adolescents in the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country Continental United States, primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 U.S. state, states, a Washington, D.C., ...

. It was begun in 1994 in response to a Congressional mandate to study

adolescent health Adolescent health, or youth health, is the range of approaches to preventing, detecting or treating young people's health and well-being. The term adolescent and young people are often used interchangeably, as are the terms Adolescent Health and Y ...

, and was initially called the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. The first wave of the study, funded by the

Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development The ''Eunice Kennedy Shriver'' National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) is one of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the United States Department of Health and Human Services. It supports and conducts research aime ...

, involved administering a questionnaire to a nationally representative sample of 7th- through 12th-graders during the 1994-95 school year. In the first wave of the study, the questionnaire was administered to about 20,000 adolescents, making it one of the largest longitudinal surveys of adolescents ever conducted. The participants were then re-interviewed in 1996 (wave II), 2001–02 (wave III), and 2008 (wave IV), with a fifth wave of data collection underway since 2016. The first three waves included, among other information, detailed and sensitive interviews, and the 11,500 participants in wave III also provided urine and saliva samples.

Objectives

The purpose of Waves I and II was to examine factors associated with health behaviors among adolescents. The purpose of Wave III, which was conducted when almost all participants were aged 18 to 26, was to determine the relationship between behaviors and experiences during adolescence and behaviors during the adjustment to young adulthood. The purpose of Wave IV, conducted when almost all participants were aged 24 to 32, was to assess developmental and health trajectories over the lifespan.

References

External links

*{{Official website, https://addhealth.cpc.unc.edu Health surveys Projects established in 1994 Research projects