Understanding Society User Support

Clarification: the data I’m seeking to either find or create is an indicator of whether an individual has health condition X at the time of the interview, either because they have been newly diagnosed or because they had it previously and they still have it. I’ve looked through the FAQ and that explanation suggested a) that a calculated “current health status” variable doesn’t exist, but also that b) calculating one might be a lot of work, having to potentially go back to Wave 1 for each respondent to track which conditions they “still have”.

Thank you for your response. However, it doesn’t answer my question. I’ve looked through the FAQs, and they imply that there are not calculated/derived variables already present in the main wave datasets that indicate someone’s current health status (at time of interview). Please confirm this. The implications of this is that in order to analyse current health status of someone (alongside other variables), users (i.e., I) will need to themselves create those variables, using the variables that are included in the dataset (i.e., historical health status by condition and whether or not respondent says they still have this condition). The latter involves significant extra work, so before I undertake it, I just want to make sure I’m not missing something by way of existing work that has already created those derived variables.

Yes, that is correct, users need to derive this variable on their own.

Best wishes,
Understanding Society User Support Team