Good morning, There are several options that I would say you could examine. The first option, and the one I would most strongly suggest, would be to to identify a topic and data set(s) that are particularly amenable to your study of interest, and then contact one or more researchers in the area that have the type of data you are interested in. I have found that people who collect data are often unable to analyze it as much as they like, and are often very happy to have someone with the appropriate skills work with their data. You might have to keep them updated on your work, and you may want to negotiate authorship on any papers and/or presentations, but it can begin collaboration and is worth any "inconvenience" of having others involved in your work.
A second option is to examine the public use health data sets available through the census bureau (http://ferret.bls.census.gov/cgi-bin/ferret). They have a very nice web interface where you can select variables you are interested in and then download the data. They have several years of the NHIS (National Health Interview Survey), the NHANES (I don't remember what it stands for.), as well as others with health information. The third option I would suggest is to see if your institution has a demography dept. or a population research institute. I think these organizations typically house data and it may be available. And there is also ISR (http://www.psc.isr.umich.edu/dads/datapages.html) at Michigan, and another population research center at Chapel Hill (http://www.cpc.unc.edu/). Good luck and I hope this is helpful. Brian Flaherty -- Brian P. Flaherty The Pennsylvania State University office phone: 814/863-5836 The Methodology Center fax: 814/863-0000 S-159 Henderson Bldg. email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] University Park, PA, 16802 http://www.personal.psu.edu/~bxf4
