The population interview assessed basic demographics and multi-faceted physical, mental, social, and epidemological factors on an aging population in four neighborhoods located on the south side of Chicago, Illinois.
The population interview was conducted across age cohorts, an Original Cohort and several Successive Cohort groups as community members became age-eligible for the study over time. Interviews were initiated on the first cohort in 1993 and the data collection period ran for approximately 3 years through 1996 involving a total of 6,157 participants. A total of six population interview cycles were conducted averaging 3 years each over a period of 18 years.
Interview data were collected in person on laptops employing Blaise software (Westat, Rockville, Maryland). Blaise is a Pascal-based data entry program designed to facilitate the preparation and management of stand-alone electronic data collection forms. This electronic system provided for automatic range checks, logical checks, and the logical routing of presented questions.
Presented here are a collection of key variables for the first 3 year round of data collection involving the original cohort. The interview itself contained over 580 questions and took approximately 60-90 minutes to complete. The provided data are de-identified and some of the variables represent calculated summary scores across related questions pertaining to various epidemological aspects of an aged population.
The privacy of individuals representing a small fraction of the cohort, those ≥90 years of age, has been protected by averaging their results across four groups, Caucasian males, Caucasion females, African-American males, and African-American females. Therefore, for participants ≥90 years of age, there are only four records.
There are two data files supplied as Excel spreadsheets, one for the core interview questions and another for medications. There can be as many as 20 prescription drugs per each subject. The medication records are structured as many:1 relationships to the core Excel data file.