Public Data

Currently, registered users can download Fragile Families baseline, one-year and three-year follow-up data for both mothers and fathers. Here are the dates of the most recent file releases and the expected timeline for future file releases:

  Most Recent (Next Release/Revision Expected)
Baseline June 2003 February 2008
One-Year Follow-Up June 2003 February 2008
Three-Year CoreOctober 2005 February 2008
Three-Year In-Home October 2005 February 2008
Three-Year Child Care   Spring 2008
Five-Year Follow-Up (core/in-home)   Summer/Fall 2008
**Medical Records (from birth hospitalization) January 2008  
**Contextual Data (first three waves) November 2006  
**Part of a restricted contract data release.
Available data can be downloaded from the OPR Data Archive.

See the Introduction to the "Fragile Families Core Public Use Data" for more detail.

Baseline, One-, and Three-year Core data are available to the public. Three-year data from the In-Home Longitudinal Study of Pre-School Aged Children are also available. Contextual data and medical records data are also available via a restricted use contract.

Study questionnaires, documentation, data alerts, responses to frequently asked questions, and a timeline for all public use file expected release dates are available at the Fragile Families web site.

Data are available for download from the Princeton University Office of Population Research (OPR) data archive (http://opr.princeton.edu/archive/ff/). Users must register before downloading data. Files are available for download as WinZip archives containing raw ASCII data with programs to generate SAS, SPSS, and STATA data sets. We include programs to generate data sets individually for mothers and fathers across waves. Users who are not comfortable reading raw data into statistical packages or who experience problems creating data sets can download SAS transport files, SPSS transport files, or STATA data sets; however, we recommend attempting to create data sets from the programs to ensure compatibility across operating systems and different versions of statistical packages. Please visit our frequently asked questions for help with downloading, unzipping, and creating data sets (http://www.fragilefamilies.princeton.edu/faq).

In order to protect the confidentiality of survey respondents, geographic (i.e., city) identifiers are not released on the public use data files. Researchers can apply for these data via a restricted use contract. Please visit http://www.fragilefamilies.princeton.edu/restricted.asp for guidelines and restrictions.

Please check back regularly for updates to our documentation, FAQs, and web site content.