Archiving the National Long Term Care Survey 1982-2004

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The National Long Term Care Survey (NLTCS) represents a foundation study that measures the progression of disability among the aged in the United States. As one of the few studies explicitly identifies and tracts transitions into disability and the impacts of this process on the lives of aging populations, the NLTCS has greatly influenced our thinking on the disability life course. The NLTCS consists of a series of six panels that interviewed original respondents or their surviving spouses approximately every five years from 1982 to 2004. The relocation of the study to the National Archive of Computerized Data on Aging (NACDA) in late 2006 and the recent completion of the 2004 wave of this study this application requests funds to support work by NACDA in the development of an enhanced NLTCS. The current application focuses on preliminary enhancements that will standardize the structure of the six waves that represent the NLTCS, creating a more uniform data collection and doing preparatory tasks to allow the submission of a larger application to create a working longitudinal file for disability life course research. We propose to implement a focused archival delivery system that will allow us to address four distinct research needs: 1) Enhancements to Data Structure: We will update and standardize the six panels of data constituting the National Long Term Care Survey to meet current archival standards. 2) Enhancements to Documentation: We will extensively revise the documentation on the NLTCS to include user-friendly versions of codebooks and questionnaires and create data definition files for use with SAS, STATA and SPSS analysis software. More importantly, we will create online documentation files for the NLTCS using XML, DDI compliant file format standards. 3) Enhancements to Dissemination: We will provide streamlined and reliable delivery services for all users interested in obtaining the NLTCS. This service, provided for all NACDA data collections, is particularly critical for the NLTCS as it has specific confidentiality issues that require the ability to manage and monitor not only the data but agreements define the use of the data. 4) Enhancements to Value Added Support Services: We will provide the NLTCS a full suite of support tools and bibliographic reference materials and a dynamic online bibliography of the study that is searchable and will have stable links to all electronically available publications. PROJECT NARRATIVE: The proposed study will enhance the capacity of health researchers to study the impacts of disability across the aging life course. By improving the quality of the public use files associated with the National Long Term Care Survey (NLTCS) the research community will have streamlined access to disability data over a two decade period from 1982 to 2004. The study looks at health, economic and family impacts on aging and the transitions into nursing homes and other institutional settings