An Overview Of The National Household Education Survey

This guide provides users of the National Household Education Survey (NHES) data with suggested techniques for working with the data files. Special attention is paid to topics that will help users avoid the most commonly made mistakes in working with NHES data. The guide is meant to be an introduction and an overview, and not a substitute for the separate user's manuals and other reports. The NHES is a data collection system of the National Center for Education Statistics that provides descriptive data on the educational activities of the U.S. population and offers policymakers, researchers, and educators a variety of statistics on the condition of education in the United States. The primary purpose of the NHES is to collect repeated measurements of the same phenomena at different points in time, but one-time surveys of topics of interest may be fielded. The NHES is a telephone survey of the noninstitutionalized civilian population of the United States, and households are selected using random digit dialing methods. The NHES has been conducted in 1991, 1993, 1995, and 1996. This guide contains the following sections: (1) introduction and overview; (2) brief descriptions of the separate NHES data files; (3) comparisons with other data sets; (4) familiarization with the data and descriptions of data collection and processing; (5) selecting variables for working data sets; (6) NHES design; (7) working with missing data; and (8) weights and estimation procedures. Appendixes contain commonly asked questions and answers, examples that illustrate points in the text, and a summary of weighting and sample variance estimation variables. (Contains 10 references.) (SLD)

The 1996 National Household Education Survey (NHES:96) was a random digit dial telephone survey of households that was developed by the National Center for Education Statistics and conducted by Westat, Inc. The NHES:96 included two topical survey components, "Parent and Family Involvement in Education," (PFI) which collected data about family involvement in children's schooling, and "Civic Involvement," (CI) which collected data about participation in civic activities and attitudes toward government. This manual provides documentation and guidance for users of the four public release data files of the NHES:96: the Household and Library File, the PFI and CI files, the Youth Civic Involvement file, and the Adult Civic Involvement File. Volume I contains information about the purpose of the study, the data collection instruments, the sample design, and data collection and data processing procedures. Volumes II through V each contain a guide to the data file and its codebook, a discussion of data considerations and anomalies, and, in appendixes, the file layout and additional information. This volume contains the following sections: (1) "Introduction"; (2) "Description of Data Collection Instruments"; (3) "Sample Design and Implementation"; (4) "Data Collection Methods and Response Rates"; and (5) "Data Preparation." An appendix presents the screener for the four files. (Contains 1 figure, 17 tables and 25 references.) (SLD)

The National Household Education Survey (NHES) is a data collection system of the National Center for Education Statistics, which has the legislative mission of collecting and publishing data on the condition of education in the United States. The NHES provides information on educational issues that are best addressed by contacting households rather than educational institutions. It is a telephone survey of the noninstitutionalized civilian population of the United States. As part of a methodological study, the NHES for 1991 contained an experiment to test the feasibility of using the NHES as a mechanism to conduct longitudinal studies of young children. This report describes the design, procedures, and results of the followup survey. In NHES:91, parents of children aged 3 to 8 years were surveyed about the care and education of their children for the NHES Early Childhood Education component. The feasibility of a longitudinal followup survey was tested by drawing a random subsample of children from that survey and attempting to locate the same respondents about 1 year later. A sample of 513 children was selected, and of the 452 parents or guardians located in the followup, 90% were successfully interviewed at the later date. Implications for longitudinal studies are discussed. It appears that the longitudinal response rate for such a survey would probably be about 62 to 65%. (Contains 8 tables, 1 figure, 1 exhibit, and 22 references.) (SLD)