The 1996 National Household Education Survey (NHES:96) was a random digit dial telephone survey of households developed by the National Center for Education Statistics and conducted by Westat, Inc. The NHES:96 included two topical survey components, "Parent and Family Involvement in Education," which collected data about family involvement in children's schooling, and "Civic Involvement" (CI), which collected data about participation in civic activities and attitudes toward government. This manual provides documentation and guidance for users of the public release data file for the Adult CI component. It contains a description of the Adult CI files and a discussion of data considerations and anomalies. Volume V is meant to be read in conjunction with Volume I, which provides information about the entire study. The Adult CI file contains data from all completed Adult CI interviews. There are 2 records for each completed interview, so that the file contains 4,500 records for the 2,250 cases. It is organized so that logically related variables are grouped together. Data are listed in the following order: (1) system variables; (2) household membership variables; (3) questionnaire item variables; (4) household characteristics variables; (5) derived variables; (6) weighting and variance estimation variables; and (7) imputation flag variables. Included as appendixes are the public file layout, Statistical Analysis System code for creating derived variables, the codebook for the Adult CI public data file, and directions and sample codes for linking NHES:96 data files. (SLD)

This guide provides users of the National Household Education Survey (NHES) data with suggested techniques for working with the data files. Special attention is paid to topics that will help users avoid the most commonly made mistakes in working with NHES data. The guide is meant to be an introduction and an overview, and not a substitute for the separate user's manuals and other reports. The NHES is a data collection system of the National Center for Education Statistics that provides descriptive data on the educational activities of the U.S. population and offers policymakers, researchers, and educators a variety of statistics on the condition of education in the United States. The primary purpose of the NHES is to collect repeated measurements of the same phenomena at different points in time, but one-time surveys of topics of interest may be fielded. The NHES is a telephone survey of the noninstitutionalized civilian population of the United States, and households are selected using random digit dialing methods. The NHES has been conducted in 1991, 1993, 1995, and 1996. This guide contains the following sections: (1) introduction and overview; (2) brief descriptions of the separate NHES data files; (3) comparisons with other data sets; (4) familiarization with the data and descriptions of data collection and processing; (5) selecting variables for working data sets; (6) NHES design; (7) working with missing data; and (8) weights and estimation procedures. Appendixes contain commonly asked questions and answers, examples that illustrate points in the text, and a summary of weighting and sample variance estimation variables. (Contains 10 references.) (SLD)