Radler Barry T
University of Wisconsin-Madison Institute on Aging.
Open Health Data. 2014;2(1). doi: 10.5334/ohd.ai.
Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) is a national longitudinal study of health and well-being (http://midus.wisc.edu/). It was conceived by a multidisciplinary team of scholars interested in understanding aging as an integrated bio-psycho-social process, and as such it includes data collected in a wide array of research protocols using a variety of survey and non-survey instruments. The data captured by these different protocols (comprising around 20,000 variables) represent survey measures, cognitive assessments, daily stress diaries, clinical, biomarker and neuroscience data which are contained in separate flat or stacked data files with a common ID system that allows easy data merges among them. All MIDUS datasets and documentation are archived at the ICPSR (http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/) repository at the University of Michigan and are publicly available in a variety of formats and statistical packages. Special attention is given to providing clear user-friendly documentation; the study has embraced the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) metadata standard and produces DDI-Lifecycle compliant codebooks. Potential for secondary use of MIDUS is high and actively encouraged. The study has become very popular with the research public as measured by data downloads and citation counts (see Reuse Potential below).
美国中年(MIDUS)研究是一项关于健康与幸福的全国性纵向研究(http://midus.wisc.edu/)。它由一个多学科的学者团队构思而成,这些学者致力于将衰老理解为一个综合的生物 - 心理 - 社会过程,因此该研究包含了通过各种调查和非调查工具在一系列研究方案中收集的数据。这些不同方案所获取的数据(约20,000个变量)包括调查测量、认知评估、日常压力日记、临床、生物标志物和神经科学数据,它们存于单独的平面或堆叠数据文件中,采用通用ID系统,便于数据合并。所有MIDUS数据集和文档都存档于密歇根大学的ICPSR(http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/)资料库,并以多种格式和统计软件包公开提供。特别注重提供清晰、用户友好的文档;该研究采用了数据文档倡议(DDI)元数据标准,并生成符合DDI生命周期的编码手册。MIDUS二次使用的潜力很大,并且受到积极鼓励。从数据下载量和引用次数来看(见下文的再利用潜力),该研究在研究界非常受欢迎。