Resources & Trainings

Watch past recordings of the center's seminars and workshops.

Below are freely available public datasets, categorized by topic. If you have suggestions or want to recommend additional datasets, please complete our feedback survey.

Data Resource Hub

Add Health

The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) contains public-use datasets that contain survey data from adolescents in grades 7-12 into adulthood. The public-use data sets contain all the survey data from In-Home Interviews but only for a subset of the full Add Health sample. Longitudinal data (Waves I-IV) are available for public use as well as the Parent Study; a sample of Add Health members that were originally interviewed at Wave I (1994-1995) who are now parents.

Youth

National

American Housing Survey

The American Housing Survey (AHS) has national public use files from 1973-2023. In the AHS microdata, the basic unit is an individual housing unit. Each record shows most of the information associated with a specific housing unit or individual, except for data items that could be used to personally identify that housing unit or individual. Datasets can be downloaded as SAS or CSV without registration.

SDOH

Physical

American Time Use Survey

The American Time Use Survey provides nationally representative estimates of how, where and with whom Americans spend their time. Individual and multi-year datasets include information on time spent on child and elderly care, volunteering and working from home. Instructions for downloading the microdata files can be found after clicking the data file link.

Time Use

National

CHARLS

Data on demographics, health status, work and retirement, income, and more are available for download from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) after registration. Individual ‘Wave’ datasets are available as well as harmonized, longitudinal datasets.

Aging

International

Chicago Health Atlas

The Chicago Department of Public Health and PHAME Center at UIC have created a health atlas for the City of Chicago. Data on hundreds of indicators are available to download at the Zip Code, Census tract, community or zone level.

Geospatial SDOH

Local

Chicago Metropolitan Environment

The Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (CMAP) has several datasets related to Environment, Study and Climate in the Chicagoland area available for use.

Environment

Local

Child Opportunity Index

Diversity Data Kids is best known for its Child Opportunity Index (COI). The COI is a composite index of children's neighborhood opportunity that contains data for every neighborhood (by census tract) in the United States from 2012 through 2021. It is comprised of 44 indicators in three domains (education, health and environment, and social and economic) and 14 subdomains.

Youth

National

City of Chicago

The city of Chicago provides datasets on neighborhood, city, ward and zip-code boundaries that can be downloaded and used freely. Shapefiles are available to view or use outside of a web browser, but you will need to use compression software and GIS software. No metadata is available.

Geospatial

Local

Cook County Health Atlas

The Cook County Health Atlas is an information sharing platform co-designed by Cook County Department of Public Health along with multiple stakeholders. Data on a variety of indicators and health outcomes are available to download at the municipal, zip code or district level.

Geospatial SDOH

Local

Dartmouth Dataverse

The Dartmouth Dataverse has clinical practice, healthcare accessibility/quality and Medicare datasets available for download after accepting the terms of use.

SDOH

Physical

Dryad

Dryad is an open data publishing platform and community committed to the open availability and re-use of all research data. Thousands of data sets are available for download across a range of topics.

General

National

ECHO

The Environmental Influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) focuses on five pediatric outcome areas: obesity, neurodevelopment, upper and lower airways, pre-, peri- and postnatal outcomes, and positive health. The ECHO-wide Cohort Study incorporates longitudinal data that has been complied and harmonized across 69 pediatric cohorts (including 30,000 pregnancies and 50,000 children). ECHO datasets are available for download after signing up.

Youth

National

ELSA

The English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA) offers data from 1998-2023 (Waves 0-10) to download by registered users.

Aging

International

Environmental Public Health Tracking Network

The National Environmental Public Health Tracking Network brings together health data and environmental data from national, state and city sources. Exposure and health outcomes data (asthma, cancer, birth defects) are among available data. Datasets can be created by choosing desired variables within the Data Explorer or existing datasets can be downloaded directly here.

Environment

National

EPA Datasets

The EPA has over 6,000 Open Data resources available for download. Dataset topics include air quality, walkability indices, safe drinking water, greenhouse gas emissions and more. No log-in or registration necessary. Download datasets by clicking directly on the icon of the format you prefer.

Environment

National

Food Access Research Atlas

The USDA has created an atlas of the U.S. by census tract to identify low food access areas. 2019 datasets are available for download by tract.

SDOH

Physical

Gateway to Global Aging Data

The USC Gateway to Global Aging team has created a harmonized dataset using the following aging data and studies: HRS (USA), MHAS (Mexico), ELSA (England), SHARE (Europe and Israel), CRELES (Costa Rica), KLoSA (South Korea), JSTAR (Japan), TILDA (Ireland), CHARLS (China) and MARS (Malaysia). Interested users need to apply for Enclave access by creating an account and filling out an application. Individual datasets for each study are available below.

Aging

National

Geodata from Social Explorer

The Social Explorer has an extensive geodata library that contains downloadable census, district, public use and tract data. Geodata is easy to download with the Professional Plan provided by Northwestern.

Geospatial

National

Health and Retirement Study

The Health and Retirement study collects aging data on US citizens. HRS data is publicly available for registered users. Data includes biennial, off-year and cross-year data.

Aging

National

Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project

The Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP) includes the largest collection of longitudinal hospital care data in the United States. The HCUP database has information on inpatient stays, emergency department visits and ambulatory care.

SDOH

Physical

ICPSR

The ICPSR contains thousands of ready-to-download datasets and individual variables on a variety of topics. Survey and longitudinal data are available for download through ICPSR.

General

National

IHME

The Global Health Data Exchange is the world’s most comprehensive catalog of surveys, censuses, vital statistics and other health-related data. After topic and country selection, survey and/or longitudinal data is available for download upon registration.

Youth

International

IPUMS Health Surveys

IPUMS Health Surveys (NHIS) uses U.S.-based data from 1963 to the present day. IPUMS Health Surveys are best for cross-sectional analyses with individual-level health events as the outcome. Add any number of variables “to cart” and IPUMS will generate a .csv dataset to download. Data can be readily downloaded from R using the IPUMS R Interface

General SDOH

National Physical

IPUMS International

IPUMS International contains census microdata for 104 countries, 565 censuses and surveys, and over one billion person records. Add any number of variables “to cart” and IPUMS will generate a .csv dataset to download. Data can be readily downloaded from R using the IPUMS R Interface.

Youth

International

IPUMS USA

IPUMS USA contains census microdata from 1790 to 2010 and American Community Surveys (ACS) from 2000 to the present. IPUMS USA data are useful for cross-sectional analyses at the household or individual level. Add any number of variables “to cart” and IPUMS will generate a .csv dataset to download. Data can be readily downloaded from R using the IPUMS R Interface

General SDOH

KIDS COUNT

KIDS COUNT is a nationwide network that tracks the well-being of children at the state-level. Data is available for download by topic and/or location. Topics include demographics, economic well-being, education, health indicators and insurance, safety and risky behaviors, and more.

Youth

National

KLoSA

The Korean Longitudinal Study of Ageing (KLoSA) started national surveys of South Korean adults 45 years and older in 2006. Basic survey data and special topic survey data are available for download after log-in.

Aging

International

LASI

The Longitudinal Aging Study in India (LASI) is a longitudinal study of individuals aged 45 and older in India. LASI collects information conceptually comparable to that gathered by the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) in the United States and its sister surveys in Asia, Europe, Mexico and elsewhere. Part of the reason for the close connection is to allow cross-country comparisons using these data.

Aging

International

MHAS

The Mexican Health and Aging Study (MHAS) offers publicly available aging data to registered users. The study has collected five waves of data (2001, 2003, 2012, 2015 and 2018) on adults over the age of 50 living in Mexico.

Aging

International

Multidimensional Deprivation Index

The Multidimensional Deprivation Index (MDI) is a measure of deprivation in six dimensions estimated from the American Community Survey: standard of living, health, education, economic security, housing quality and neighborhood. State MDI rates from 2010-2019 and 2021-2023 and County MDI rates from 2010-2019 are available for free and easy download.

SDOH

Physical

NHANES

The National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) collects nationally representative data about the health of adults and children in the United States. Two-year period survey data is available from 1999-2023, while data prior to 1999 is grouped in larger year interval datasets. Continuous variables are available to search and download.

Youth

National

NHATS

The National Health and Aging Trends Study (NHATS) is a longitudinal, nationally representative study of Medicare beneficiaries aged 65 and older. Public data files are available after log in.

Aging

National

NHGIS

The National Historical Geographic Information System (NHGIS) provides free online access to summary statistics and GIS files for U.S. censuses and other nationwide surveys from 1790 through the present. The NHGIS provides easy access to all levels of U.S. census geography: states, counties, tracts, and blocks. Data can be readily downloaded from R using the IPUMS R interface.

Geospatial

National

NHIS

National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) data is available for adults and children annually. Other available data includes parent-child pair data and imputed income data. While these surveys are usually best for cross-sectional analyses, some years have adult longitudinal data available (i.e. 2020 adult longitudinal).

Youth

National

openICPSR

openICPSR is a self-publishing repository for social, behavioral and health sciences research data. A service of the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), openICPSR is particularly well-suited for the deposit of replication data sets for researchers who need to publish their raw data associated with a journal article so that other researchers can replicate their findings. ICPSR does not improve or alter datasets deposited in openICPSR in any way. Data are preserved as-is and distributed in the same condition and format submitted by the depositor.

SDOH

National

Racial Segregation and Neighborhoods

Staff and faculty at Northwestern have published an Open ICPSR project that measured residential and racial segregation using Gi*statistics.

SDOH

Physical

Downloadable survey data is available from the Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) after completion of registration. Countries throughout Europe and Israel have participated in SHARE data.

Aging

International

Social Deprivation Index

The Social Deprivation Index is a composite measure of seven demographic characteristics collected in the American Community Survey (ACS): percent living in poverty, percent with less than 12 years of education, percent single-parent households, the percentage living in rented housing units, the percentage living in the overcrowded housing unit, percent of households without a car and percentage of unemployed adults under 65 years of age. The SDI measure is available at county, census tract, aggregated Zip Code Tabulation Area (ZCTA) and Primary Care Service Area (PCSA, v 3.1) levels.

SDOH

Physical

Social Determinants of Health Database

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality has a Social Determinants of Health database with Variable files that correspond to five key SDOH domains: social context (e.g., age, race/ethnicity, veteran status), economic context (e.g., income, unemployment rate), education, physical infrastructure (e.g, housing, crime, transportation) and healthcare context (e.g., health insurance). The files can be linked to other data by geography (county, ZIP Code and census tract). The database includes data files and codebooks by year at three levels of geography, as well as a documentation file.

SDOH

National

The Atlas of Rural and Small-Town America

The Atlas of Rural and Small-Town America provides statistics by broad categories of socioeconomic factors. Data are grouped by topic and reported in four tabs within the spreadsheet: People, Jobs, Income, Veterans and County Classifications. Each tab includes the county FIPS code as the first column.

SDOH

The Harvard Dataverse

The Harvard Dataverse contains datasets available for download on a variety of climate-related topics such as air emissions, environmental justice mapping, air quality index and wildfires.

Environment

National

TIGER-Line Files

The U.S. Census Bureau website has census mapping files and line shapefiles available to download and merge existing data. While the core TIGER/Line Files and Shapefiles do not include demographic data, they do contain geographic entity codes that can be linked to the Census Bureau’s demographic data, available here.

Geospatial

National

US Crime Data

The Social Explorer had county level crime data from the FBI and UCR from 2010-current. Northwestern provides a Professional Plan to Social Explorer for data access.

SDOH

Physical

USDA Climate Datasets

The USDA Geospatial Data Gateway contains ready-to-download monthly and annual average precipitation and temperature datasets at State and National levels that can be downloaded without placing an order.

Environment

National

YRBSS

Since 1990, the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System has surveyed youths in the U.S. Survey topics include demographics, youth health behaviors and conditions, substance use behaviors and student experiences. Bi-annual data is available for download.

Time Use

National