Health Insurance Dynamics (HIDyn)
Data and Documentation
Overview of the HIDyn Database
HIDyn is a person-level database consisting of 48 months of information for each person in the 1996 Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) in a longitudinal format. HIDyn reorganizes and recodes public use data from SIPP that the Census Bureau releases in a person-month format. The 1996 survey interview period covered 48 months, with interviewing beginning for the first quarter of the sample in April 1996 and continuing every fourth months until the last quarter of the sample was interviewed in March 2000. SIPP respondents were asked about each of the four months in the reference period prior to the month of interview.
Five types of SIPP variables - related to health insurance, income, employment, demographics, and weighting and variance estimation - that are pertinent to the study of health insurance were identified for inclusion in HIDyn. These variables were extracted and merged to create a longitudinal file in which each survey participant has a single record of data with values of each variable for each of the 48 months of observation. Variable names in the Census Bureau's public use files have been altered in the longitudinal file only by the addition of the month-number as a suffix. The original name of the variable was retained in this way to allow users to identify and access documentation for the original SIPP variables in the public use data dictionaries. (For example, SIPP variables giving an individual's age (TAGE) have been renamed TAGE1, TAGE2, ... , TAGE48 to correspond with the respondent's age in month 1, month 2, ..., month 48 of the survey.)
In addition to the original public use variables, HIDyn also includes some variables created by the research team to summarize monthly variables over time or by recoding other variables for each month. For example, variables were created to count the number of months over the panel that a person held particular types of insurance, and monthly indicators were constructed to identify people who were uninsured in each month. The HIDyn Data Dictionary describes response categories for created variables. The construction of each created variable is described in alphabetical order.
Last modified: 06/21/06 | Contact Webmaster
