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HINTS Data Merging Code Tool

Use this interactive tool to develop SAS (version 9.3 or higher) and Stata code to merge multiple iterations of HINTS data, as well as generate example/template analysis code for frequencies/cross-tabulations and logistic and linear regressions.

Why would you want to merge two or more sets of HINTS data?

Combining multiple iterations of HINTS data can help to fulfill two key goals:

  1. Examining trends over time. Because of common sampling procedures used across the repeated, cross-sectional HINTS surveys, each HINTS iteration can be considered as an independent sample of the non-institutionalized US adult population 18 and older. Thus, iterations can be merged together to look at patterns over time.
  2. Yielding a larger sample size. This can be useful specifically when a particular subgroup is of interest (e.g., racial or ethnic subgroups), but there aren’t enough respondents in one HINTS iteration to provide stable outcome estimates. This technique assumes that the outcome of interest does not have significant changes over time and requires that the merged dataset be analyzed as a whole.

Additional Resources

A series of videos demonstrating how to merge data from HINTS iterations is available on the HINTS website. Examples of Stata and SPSS codes for merging HINTS data can be found in the Survey Overview & Data Analysis Recommendations file included in the publicly available HINTS data packages.

Merging Tool

Select Your Data Format:

Select what cycles you want.






   
   
   
   


Select what analyses you want.