Longitudinal datasets of potential interest to health economists

At the beginning of my PhD I was quite stuck to find good data. I wanted data with good measures of mental health, physical health, employment, income, small area indicators and standard controls like age, gender, education and so on. I eventually found what I needed, but it required looking at many datasets. I am sure other people have faced similar problems. This post attempts to give you a bit of a short-cut, providing an overview of datasets that might be interesting to health economists who work empirically.

The focus here is on datasets which allow following individuals over time (even if they weren’t specifically meant as panels). The reason for this is simply that I have more knowledge of these datasets and these alone already bring this post to a substantial length.

The selection criteria for datasets to make it into this post are quite simple: I have to know of their existence and they have to be available in English. I cannot guarantee for the quality of all the dataset as I have only used a few of them. Additionally this aspect depends on your research question.

I will certainly have missed one or two interesting datasets, so I am already curious about your comments and additions at the bottom. The reason to include only English datasets is quite simply that using a dataset in a foreign language is a pain, though it is possible! I have a forthcoming publication using a Portuguese dataset without speaking a single word of Portuguese. However, it took me several highly disciplined days of using Google translate to find all the variables I needed. It worked out in the end for me, but I would not encourage it! The reverse is true, if you are proficient in another language. Using data from that country for your research (which might so far have only used UK/US data) might be part of your competitive advantage. Naturally, the table below is not exhaustive and as already mentioned I am looking forward to learning about other interesting surveys. However, here are a few words of warning. Most of my “warnings” are straightforward, but better to be safe than sorry, right?

1. Not all of these datasets are free to researchers. In fact, some of them come at substantial costs, especially the administrative ones. I would advise to narrow it down and make your own cost-benefit analysis to determine which dataset you will use. Your supervisor and/or colleagues can probably give you some advice.
2. Merging and cleaning most of these datasets is often a substantial amount of work. Economies of scale might therefore advocate in favour of sticking to one dataset if possible. Some datasets are even so complex that there are specific workshops on them. ISER, Essex, for example, is offering workshops on Understanding Society (for free) and CHE, York offer workshops on HES.
3. If what you are looking for does not exist in one dataset, but exists in two datasets from the same source, you might want to check whether they are linkable. HES for example can be linked to the Scottish Health Survey and should soon also be linkable to ELSA.
4. Another option to pursue if this table does not provide you the dream dataset is to check out websites which offer access to publicly available datasets to researchers. For the UK that would be the UK Data Archive, for Ireland look at the Irish Social Science Data Archive. A similar website exists for the Netherlands, called CentER Data. The European Institute also has a good website with an overview of datasets.

I hope this shortens the search for a data source for some and I am looking forward to hearing about further interesting datasets which could help me in my research.

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