I am conducting research using NHIS data from 1999-2018. I am trying to use the point estimates for family income instead of the ranges, but unless I am missing something, IPUMS only has point estimates for 2008 forward. Yet NCHS has supplemental income files that provide point estimates of family income (with top-coding) for years prior to 2008. Am I correct about this? Is there a reason IPUMS doesn’t use the supplemental income files to provide income point estimates prior to 2008? Thanks!
While we don’t currently offer the supplemental income files for these earlier years, we may in the future. I am in conversation with our IPUMS NHIS team about this and will follow up with you here if I have any more information to share.
The imputed income point estimates were not included with the initial releases of the 1997-2008 NHIS samples by the NCHS, but were instead all released in 2010. Now that our IPUMS NHIS team is aware of their availability, they will look into providing them via IPUMS NHIS in the future. You can check our revision history page to see when they are released. In the meantime, you can obtain the data from the NCHS website and merge it with an IPUMS data extract that includes your variables of interest. Please see this detailed guide on how to link the two files.