The NCES National Household Education Survey (NHES) program administered two national surveys in 2019—the Early Childhood Program Participation (ECPP) survey and the Parent and Family Involvement in Education (PFI) survey. The ECPP survey collects information on young children's care and education, including the use of home-based care with both relatives and nonrelatives and center-based care and education. The survey examines how well these care arrangements cover work hours, costs of care, location of care, the process of selecting care, and factors making it difficult to find care. The PFI survey collects information on a range of issues related to how families connect to schools, including information on family involvement with schools, school choice, homeschooling, virtual education, and homework practices.
NCES released data from the 2019 NHES administration on January 28, 2021. For each of the two surveys, this release includes the following:
- Public-use data files, in ASCII, CSV, SAS, SPSS, Stata, and R
- Restricted-use data files (in formats listed above and with codebook)
- Public-Use Data File Codebook
- Data File User's Manual (for both public-use and restricted-use files)
That's a lot of information! How should you use it? We suggest you start by viewing the NHES online data Distance Learning Dataset Training modules. The modules provide a high-level overview of the NHES program and the data it collects. They also include important considerations to ensure that your analysis takes into account the NHES's complex sample design (such as applying weights and estimating standard errors).
You should first view the five general NHES modules, which were developed for the 2012 NHES data. These modules are:
- Introduction to the NHES
- Getting Started with the NHES Data
- Data Collected Through the NHES
- NHES Sample Design, Weights, Variance, and Missing Data
- Considerations for Analysis of NHES Data
A sixth module explains key changes in the 2019 ECPP and PFI surveys compared to their respective 2012 surveys:
- Introduction to the 2019 NHES Data Collection
The sixth module also provides links to the 2019 ECPP and PFI data, restricted-use licensing information, and other helpful resources.
Now you are ready to go! If you have any questions, please contact us at NHES@ed.gov.
By Lisa Hudson, NCES
