title: The general social survey-national death index: an innovative new dataset for the social sciences.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Social epidemiology seeks in part to understand how social factors--ideas, beliefs, attitudes, actions, and social connections--influence health. However, national health datasets have not kept up with the evolving needs of this cutting-edge area in public health. Sociological datasets that do contain such information, in turn, provide limited health information.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Our team has prospectively linked three decades of General Social Survey data to mortality information through 2008 via the National Death Index. In this paper, we describe the sample, the core elements of the dataset, and analytical considerations.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The General Social Survey-National Death Index (GSS-NDI), to be released publicly in October 2011, will help shape the future of social epidemiology and other frontier areas of public health research.
authors: Department of Health Policy and Management, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, 600 W, 168th Street, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10032, USA. pm124@columbia.edu.
authors: Peter
authors: P
authors: Muennig
authors: Gretchen
authors: G
authors: Johnson
authors: Jibum
authors: J
authors: Kim
authors: Tom W
authors: TW
authors: Smith
authors: Zohn
authors: Z
authors: Rosen