Integrated Health Interview Series (IHIS): A free online data resource for teaching U.S. public health and statistics

With support from NIH, researchers have created Integrated Health Interview Series (IHIS), a free, online, consistently-coded version of the U.S. National Health Interview Survey (NHIS). Used to monitor U.S. public health for half a century, and the main source for evaluating progress toward Healthy People goals, NHIS provides invaluable data on health behaviors, conditions, and care. With thousands of variables, large sample size, and sampling frame representative of the non-institutionalized civilian population, NHIS is also a potential tool for teaching statistics. IHIS makes it easy for students to analyze NHIS data, through the following methods: coding variables consistently; providing detailed documentation (on question wording, codes and frequencies, universes, and comparability issues); simplifying weights and constructing survey design variables suitable for pooling data across years; and allowing researchers to create customized data extracts with only the years and variables they need, at no cost over the Internet. Students experienced in using statistical packages can select from over 7000 variables for multivariate analyses. Students new to data analysis can use the online tabulator to frame and test hypotheses (running frequencies, cross-tabulations, means, and significance tests). IHIS is a proven resource for classroom use. Of the more than 1000 registered IHIS users, 12 percent are undergraduates and 43 percent are graduate students. Over a quarter of registrants report "class assignment" as the outcome of their research. This presentation will highlight key features of IHIS that make it suitable for classroom use and provide examples of IHIS use in teaching statistics and public health.