Study Design
Wave III Education Data Users’ Guides

The Adolescent Health and Academic Achievement Study (AHAA) is the educational component of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), a school-based survey of a nationally representative sample of adolescents in 7th through 12th grade from 132 public, private, and parochial schools (Bearman, Jones, and Udry 1997). While giving depth to the social context of the lives of adolescents, Add Health has limited information on the academic trajectory of youth. The focus of AHAA is to contribute this information by collecting official high school transcripts from all Wave III Add Health respondents, and critical contextual information about the schools these respondents last attended. The AHAA study is a separate data collection designed to create an educational data set that can be studied independently or in relation to Add Health, facilitating an analysis of the course-taking patterns of students who attended Add Health high schools. Importantly, AHAA allows analyses of the relationships between Add Health indicators capturing adolescent social and health-related behaviors and outcomes, and measurements of students’ academic experiences as recorded on student transcripts. AHAA’s structural compatibility with the 1987, 1990, 1994, 1998, and 2000 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) High School Transcript Studies (HSTS) also makes it possible to compare data collected for AHAA with data gathered for these other existing national-level data sets.

Design and Implementation of the Adolescent Health and Academic Achievement Study, 2007