Is it possible to link data for a child (say in 1997) and relate it to his adult responses (say in 2017)?Thanks!
It is possible to link data for a child to his/her adult responses, but it is very limited.
Using the public use data available through IPUMS MEPS, you can link the responses of individuals in the MEPS panel who were age 16-17 and turned 18 at some point during the panel. MEPS reinterviews a subsample of households that responded to the previous year’s NHIS, so you could also link children 15 and older to their adult responses in the MEPS. Those linking keys must be accessed in a restricted data environment, however, and must be requested from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) directly. Finally, it is possible to also link responses of people in NHIS to the mortality data which ranges between 1986 and 2011. However, NHIS suppresses the linkages between individuals who were children at the time of the NHIS and the mortality data on the public use files.