In response to many requests from Challenge participants, we are now able to provide a .dta file in Stata 14 format. This file contains metadata which we hope will help participants to find variables of interest more easily.

Contents of the .dta file

If you have been working with our background.csv file and the codebooks available at fragilefamilies.princeton.edu, then this .dta file provides the same information you already had, but in a new format.

• Each variable has an associated label which contains a truncated version of the survey question text.
• For each categorical variable, the text meaning of each numeric level of that variable is recorded with a value label.

You are welcome to build models from the .csv file or from the .dta file.

Distribution of the .dta file

All new applicants to the Challenge will receive a zipped folder containing both background.csv and background.dta.

Anyone who received the data on or before May 24, 2017 may send an email to fragilefamilieschallenge@gmail.com to request a new version of the data file.

Using the .dta file

Stata users can easily load the .dta file, which is in Stata format.

We have prepared a blog post about using the .dta file in R and about using the .dta file in Python to facilitate use of the file in these other software packages.

We hope the metadata in this file enables everyone to build better models more easily!