A.5 NSDUH (2019)

Background

The National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), a product of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, measures the use of illegal substances, the use and misuse of prescribed substances, substance use disorder and treatment, and mental health outcomes (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration 2022).

Documentation

Downloadable data and documentation are freely available from SAMHSA (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Center for Behavioral Health Statistics and Quality 2019) for research and statistical purposes. Documentation for the 2019 data can be found in the 2019 NSDUH Public Use File Codebook. See also Policies.

Teaching Datasets

SAMHSA bears no responsibility for use of the data or for interpretations or inferences based upon such uses. Any analyses, interpretations, or conclusions reached herein are are only for the purpose of illustrating regression methods and are credited to the author, not to SAMHSA. The author makes no claim or implication that any inferences derived from these teaching datasets are valid estimates.

The teaching dataset nsduh2019_adult_sub_rmph.RData includes a random subset of 1000 observations of adults, and variables that have been renamed for clarity. Sampling was done with replacement using sampling weights in order to approximate a nationally representative distribution. This sampling method is solely for the purpose of creating a teaching dataset to illustrate regression methods. Chapter 8 discusses analyzing data using the survey weights appropriately using the full dataset (nsduh2019_rmph.RData). Chapter 9 uses the dataset nsduh_mar_rmph.RData, derived from nsduh2019_adult_sub_rmph.RData with some cases removed and some data values randomly set to missing, in an illustration of multiple imputation.

Creating the Teaching Datasets

To create the teaching datasets, do the following.

  • Download the .zip file containing the 2019 R dataset found at 2019 Population Data.
  • Extract the .RData file NSDUH_2019.RData from the .zip file.
  • Download the R script files NSDUH_2019 Process.R and NSDUH_2019 MI Simulation.R from RMPH Resources.
  • Run the R script file NSDUH_2019 Process.R to process the raw data and create the following teaching datasets:
    • nsduh2019_rmph.RData
    • nsduh2019_adult_sub_rmph.RData
  • Place these .Rdata files in your “Data” folder.
  • Run the R script file NSDUH_2019 MI Simulation.R to process the raw data and create the following teaching datasets:
    • nsduh_mar_rmph.RData
  • Place this .Rdata file in your “Data” folder.

Rows and columns

These files have the following numbers of rows and columns:

load("Data/nsduh2019_rmph.RData")
dim(nsduh)
## [1] 56136    57
load("Data/nsduh2019_adult_sub_rmph.RData")
dim(nsduh_adult_sub)
## [1] 1000   54
load("Data/nsduh_mar_rmph.RData")
dim(nsduh_mar)
## [1] 843   5

References

Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. 2022. “National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH).” https://www.samhsa.gov/data/data-we-collect/nsduh-national-survey-drug-use-and-health.
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Center for Behavioral Health Statistics and Quality. 2019. National Survey on Drug Use and Health 2019 (NSDUH-2019-DS0001). Substance Abuse; Mental Health Data Archive. https://datafiles.samhsa.gov/.