By Michelle Lee

Hi all! I thought I’d give you information on how to get the data from NILSY97, as it was something I had trouble with!

So the first thing you’ll need to do is go to the website and login. The website is: https://www.nlsinfo.org/investigator/pages/login.jsp. Username: ndclassdata@gmail.com Password is dnuvw03067.

Once logged in, you will be prompted from the drop-down menu to select the study you want to work with. You’ll want to choose NLSY1997-2009(rounds 1-13).

Once you choose this study, you will get a screen that has several tabs. Click on the second one from the left, which says “Variable Search”. Once you click on this tab, you will see an index on the left of your screen. Choose the Education, Training and Achievement Scores Link (first on the list), then select Cognitive Tests, then Summary measures. Under Summary Measures you will see PIAT scores. Click on the PIAT scores to load the data.

You wil have the option to select data from different years. Make sure you select PIAT Scores from 1997. Once you have selected this data, click on the tab titled “review selected variables”. Make sure you select the PIAT data and deselect any saved variables you do not want.

When you have chosen what you want to download, click on the Save/Download tab. You will then see a second set of tabs to choose from. Click on the Advanced Download. The only files you want to download are the Codebook of selected variables, Short Description File, and the Comma delineated file of selected variables. You are now ready to download your data!

Once your data is downloaded onto a file on your computer, open the folder in your downloads. Within the folder, you will see a .csv document. Click on this to open the csv data. It will most likely open in Excel.

A tip: once you open the data into Excel, you should have three columns: one of ID numbers, one of gender (indicated by a 1 or 2) and one of scores. The column headers will be a long series of numbers. The best thing to do is re-title these headers “ID”, “Gender”, and “Scores”. You can do this simply by clicking on the box that contains the header, deleting the text and re-typing a title. As long as you save the Excel document after you make these changes, these variables will be read into R and thus be much easier to work with.

Save the Excel spreadsheet onto your computer (I saved it into my documents, but you can save it wherever you set your working directory). The CSV data is now ready to be read into R just like you would any other CSV file!