The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, also known as Add Health, is a multiwave longitudinal study of adolescents in the United States.
It was begun in 1994 in response to a Congressional mandate to study adolescent health, and was initially called the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health.
[1] The first wave of the study, funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, involved administering a questionnaire to a nationally representative sample of 7th- through 12th-graders during the 1994-95 school year.
[2][4] The purpose of Waves I and II was to examine factors associated with health behaviors among adolescents.
The purpose of Wave IV, conducted when almost all participants were aged 24 to 32, was to assess developmental and health trajectories over the lifespan.