Archiving for Minority Health: Documenting the National Couples' Health and Time Study

Project Summary The NICHD-supported National Couples' Health and Time Study (NCHAT) is a rich multi-method study of same- and different-gender couples collected during a pivotal time in U.S. history, when both COVID and racism were acutely felt. It is a fully-powered study of American couples that includes population-representative samples of racial and ethnic minorities and sexual minorities. These data are the first of their kind and are an unparalleled resource of survey, time diary, experience sampling method, dyadic, and geospatial data for social scientists across a range of disciplines. Rapid documentation and dissemination of NCHAT are essential to allow the social science community to conduct timely, urgently-needed analyses with these cutting-edge data. NCHAT is uniquely suited to address COVID trauma, racial trauma, family functioning, and physical and mental health and includes an abundance of contextual and acute measures of race and racism, sexism, and heterosexism. The data includes survey data from 2992 main respondents and 1232 partner respondents. Over half of the sample identifies as a sexual minority, and 15% identify as Latinx and 12% as Black. About a third are in same-gender relationships. These data are critical to enable data analysis to identify candidate mechanisms underlying sexual minority and racial and ethnic health disparities during the pandemic and the factors that exacerbated or alleviated these disparities. This proposal seeks to freely and broadly distribute these novel data while providing exceptional user support to ensure it is widely used. Leveraging infrastructure at the Institute for Social Research and Data Innovation (ISRDI) at the University of Minnesota—home to the Minnesota Population Center and IPUMS—we aim to make the data publicly available and to establish a secure data enclave to allow researchers access to restricted-use data including geospatial data. This project has four specific aims: Aim 1. Produce detailed documentation and an ethical use training module; Aim 2. Create the “NCHAT Portal,” a web-based platform to distribute the main NCHAT survey data; Aim 3. Design and maintain a secure enclave environment to distribute partner, time diary, experience sampling method, and geospatial data; Aim 4. Support NCHAT users and establish an NCHAT Users Conference. These data will be invaluable to a broad array of researchers, including those from public health, sociology, human development, psychology, and geography. Due to inequities in who receives funding for research, many marginalized scholars and scholars who study marginalized populations, do not have access to fully powered datasets. As such, identifying the underlying causes of health disparities remains difficult. Population health research is in critical need of a shift from a focus on marginalized identities, such as race, as a risk factor to a focus on the root causes of marginalization, such as racism, as the risk factor. With broad dissemination of the NCHAT data and support for NCHAT users, critical population health questions will be answered, and innovative and potentially transformational solutions for some of our most pressing public health problems will be identified and informed.