NHANES III data in Stata

[Richard Gillum]

New to statalist.org. Where can I find data dictionaries for importing NHANES III ASCII public use data from http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nhanes/nhanes3/data_files.htm? Have any dictionaries been posted online?

[Lance Erickson]

To my knowledge, the CDC has not produced data dictionaries for Stata for NHANES II. The first time I used the data I used the SAS dictionaries (although I don't believe that's what they are called in SAS...can't remember exactly) to open the data in SAS and then saved the data in SAS in Stata's .dta format.

[Clyde Schechter]

Like Lance, I have never seen a Stata data dictionary from the CDC in connection with NHANES data.

[Dick Campbell]

There are several NHANES III datasets. Stata code to read them all can be found at the ICPSR website. The data are publicly available; your institution does not have to be a member of ICPSR to access the files.

[Dick Campbell]

I answered this too quickly. ICPSR puts up Stata code for later iterations of NHANES but not for this one. I did this from memory and should have checked. My apologies. If you have access to SAS you can read the data in and transfer it to Stata in several different ways. The easiest is Stat/Transfer but there are other ways. You can find some useful information here.