Developing a metadata data model for the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES).

The National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), is a large and comprehensive health survey utilizing leading edge technologies to produce national estimates of health measures and the nutritional status of the U.S. population. Early NHANES metadata models grouped data by categories with little specificity and often not capturing the complexity of the survey. Subsequently, existing models at the Census Bureau, CDC, and the EPA were evaluated in addition to industry standards, such as DDI, Dublin Core, and ISO 1179. For the NHANES metadata model, the DDI standard and CDC Public Health Conceptual Model were chosen as the backbone for constructing the data model. The new model has led to increased data accuracy and several value-added products for producing codebooks, automatically checking questionnaire skip patterns, and producing questionnaire instrumentation.