Description: The mission of IPUMS (ipums.org) is to democratize access to data by allowing researchers to leverage publicly available datasets to answer a broad range of topics. This workshop will introduce harmonized IPUMS versions of the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) (available at nhis.ipums.org), including linkages between the NHIS and the National Death Index (NDI). The NHIS is the leading source of information on the health of the US population. It covers health status and behaviors, health care access, and sociodemographic characteristics such as age, sex, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, and immigration status. The National Center for Health Statistics, which collects the NHIS, has linked NHIS survey records to the NDI, a digital repository of all death certificates from local vital statistics offices, to create a data resource known as the Linked Mortality File (LMF). Survey linked mortality data such as the LMF fill a critical knowledge gap about the correlates of mortality.
In this workshop, we will first introduce the IPUMS NHIS data, focusing on our harmonization approach and the mortality variables derived from the LMF. We will then overview the demographic groups historically included/excluded from official mortality statistics and discuss how linked population survey-death certificate data can fill in gaps in official mortality statistics and address broader mortality-related questions. Last, we will lead workshop participants through a hands-on activity of calculating mortality statistics using the harmonized NHIS-LMF data from IPUMS.