Task 2: How to Download Data Files and Documentation

There are two items you will need to download:

• SAS Transport file of data, and
• Documentation.

IMPORTANT NOTE

For the purposes to completing this module, assume you are preparing to do an analysis of cardiovascular disease using NHANES data. In this task, you will be downloading the data and related documentation for the blood pressure examination component. You can download the cholesterol laboratory, blood pressure questionnaire, and demographics components in the activities at the end of this task to gather all the data files and documentation for your analysis.

The following steps are similar to the steps presented in Locate Variables, only now you will be downloading the files to your computer. If you downloaded the files while you were researching the variables, then you may have more documentation files than you need for your analysis.

Step 1: SAS transport file of data

Begin at the NHANES homepage (shown here on the right), click the Questionnaires, Data Sets, and Related Documentation link, then click the NHANES 2001-2002 link. Scroll down and click the Examination link.

This is the 2001-2002 Examination page. From here you can download the data file and documentation for any publicly released item in the examination component.

You are interested in the Blood Pressure items, so scroll to the Blood pressure line, and click the Data link to download the SAS transport file.

• If you have SAS installed, your browser will recognize it as a SAS transport file and prompt you to save the file (bpx_b.xpt). Navigate to the TEMP folder you create in Task 1 and save the file there.

• If you do not have SAS installed, clicking the link will result in gibberish appearing in your window as the browser tries to read the file. In this case, you will need to right-click the file and save it to your TEMP folder from Task 1.

Step 2: Documentation

The survey documentation files, which also contain the codebook and frequencies, are web pages. Remaining on the Blood Pressure line, you can:

• click the Docs link and open it, and then save it to your TEMP folder, or
• right-click the Docs link and directly save it to your TEMP folder.

 

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