NCHS's Vital Statistics Natality Birth Data -- 1968-2010
Natality Data from the
National
Vital Statistics System of the National Center
for Health Statistics provide demographic and health data for births
occuring during the calendar year. The microdata are based on information abstracted from birth
certificates filed in vital statistics offices of each State and District of Columbia.
Other available birth data are
Birth Cohort Linked Birth/Infant Death Data ,
Period Linked Birth/Infant Death Data from the Perinatal
Mortality Data,
and Matched Multiple Birth Data.
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By using this data you signify your agreement with
NCHS's data use rules.
Works referring to the datasets or codebooks should contain a
citation to NCHS.
Published material derived from this data should include a citation such as this
at the bottom of the table:
"Source: National Center for Health Statistics (span of years used)"
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Prior to 1972, data are based on a 50-percent sample of birth certificates from all States.
Beginning in 1972, data are based on a 100-percent sample of birth certificates from some states
and on a 50-percent sample from the remaining States. The number of States from which 100 percent
of the records are used has increased from 6 in 1972 to all States and the District of Columbia
in 1985. Birth data from the U.S. Territories Guam, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands
are available on a separate file beginning in 1994. In 1998, American Samoa and the Northern
Marianas were added to the U.S. Territories files.
Demographic data include variables such as date of birth, age and educational attainment of
parents, marital status, live-birth order, race, sex, and geographic area. Health data include
items such as birth weight, gestation, prenatal care, attendant at birth, and Apgar score.
Geographic data includes state, county, city (available for cities of 250,000+ (up to 1980) and
100,000+ (1980-)), SMSA (1980-), and metropolitan and nonmetropolitan counties.
Population files (such as natpop91.dat.Z) contain the population
counts for U.S. women 15-44, those traditionally thought to be "at risk" for giving birth.
The files have 2448 lines. Each line represents the count of one combination of
51 state x 6 age x 4 race x 2 Hispanic origin of mother categories. These files
are available for 1991 on. Population files are not available for the U.S. Territories.
SEER provides helpful
U.S. Population data
for 1969 on.
Both ".Z" and ".zip" files can be uncompressed with winzip.
In addition, ".Z" files can be uncompressed using the UNIX uncompress
command and ".zip" files can be unzipped with pkunzip.
To check your ability to uncompress these files, download the small files
compress.Z or compress.zip.
These files give an example of how to read in .Z and .zip ASCII files into SAS for UNIX
without decompressing the files.
To download files in Internet Explorer, right click on them and select "Save Target As...".
If the pdf documents appear to be all blank pages, get the latest Acrobat
Reader at www.abobe.com.
Variable layouts are basically the same for periods 1972-1977, 1979-1981,
1982-1983, 1984-1985, and 1992-1994 though a few codes change across years.
Thanks to Michael Greenstone and Kenneth Chay for the 1975-1985 data.
Raw file size: The compressed 1968-1985 files are between 50 and 130 Mb, and the compressed
1991-1994, and 1998-2002 files are 120-155 Mb. The 2003 file is over 200Mb.
The compression ratio for these files is over 90%.
Because of the large size of the complete collection, we would prefer that you not
download large fractions over the web.
NBER internal users can obtain the data from a UNIX shell at /homes/data/natality
or on an NBER PC via Network Neighborhood --> NBER --> home --> data --> natality
Updates and changes.
* The 2003 datafile is nearly four times larger than files from previous years.
This is because while the 2002 file is 352 characters wide, the 2003 file is 1297
characters wide. The uncompressed 2002 file is about 1.3 Gb and the 2003
file is almost 5 Gb! If your compression software has a 2 Gb limit, it won't work.
Try other software such as WinRAR.
To report errors, or if you have comments or suggestions, an interest in SAS library
files for the later data, e-mail
jroth@nber.org
| Last Update: March 12, 2013 |
Created by Jean Roth September 15, 2000 |
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