SHPPS 2012 data include 13 questionnaires, 15 data files, and 15 codebooks. Files are grouped by administration level (state and district) and by component.

Data Files and Methods

School Health Policies and Practices Study (SHPPS) data are available in three file formats: Access®, SPSS® and ASCII. The Access, SPSS, and ASCII data can be downloaded and used as is. Additionally, SAS® programs are provided to convert the ASCII data into SAS datasets for use in those packages.

File Names

File names include SHPPS_ followed by three parts. The first part identifies the component, the second part identifies the level, and the third part indicates the survey year.

Component	Part
Health education	hlthed
Physical education and activity	physed
Health services	hlthser
Mental health and social services	mental
Healthy and safe school environment	env
Nutrition services	nutr
Faculty and staff health promotion	faculty
Status	status
Level	Part
State	s
District	d

The questionnaire and codebook files use the same naming convention but add the words “questionnaire” or “codebook” to the file name.

For example, the files for health education at the state level would be:

Health education file	Name
SPSS data	SHPPS_hlthes2012.sav
Questionnaire	SHPPS_hlthes2012questionnaire.pdf
Codebook	SHPPS_hlthes2012codebook.pdf

Status Files

The status files contain additional information for the component-specific datasets. There are four status files, one for each level (state and district). The status files contain

Enrollment information
Region of country
Overall weight variable to be used when the datasets are combined across components

Each status file contains a specific variable that needs to be used to link its associated dataset. For example, to link the state status file with another SHPPS state-level dataset, the variable STCMSID is used.

Questionnaires

Level	Variable
State	STCMSID
District	DISTCMSID

The questionnaires are available in PDF format.

Codebooks

The codebooks are available in PDF format. The codebooks contain the

Variable names*
Variable labels
Values
Formatted values
Unweighted counts

*The first three letters of the variable name identify the questionnaire. The number at the end of the variable names represents the question number from the associated questionnaire.

Using ASCII Files

Save the ASCII data file to a folder on your computer.
Specify column locations for each variable as needed by the software you are using.

Note: How to use the ASCII data varies from one software package to another. Column positions for each variable usually have to be specified. Column positions for each variable can be found in the documentation for each year’s data. Consult your software documentation for more information.

Using Access Files:

Save the Access file to a folder on your computer.
Uncompress the Access file.

Note: The file is stored in compressed form to improve download time; it will need to be uncompressed before it can be used. See File Formats Help for more information on uncompressing the file.

Using SPSS Files:

Save the SPSS data file to a folder on your computer.
Open the SPSS data file in SPSS.

Using SAS Files

Download the SHPPS 2012 SAS Format ProgramCdc-sas.
Save the SAS Format Program, SAS Input Program, and the ASCII data files to a folder on your computer.
Open the SAS Format Program in SAS and edit it according to the instructions included in the comments in the program.
Run the program. This will create a permanent format library in the folder specified in the SAS program.
Open the SAS Input Program in SAS and edit it according to the instructions included in the comments in the program.
Run the program. This will read the ASCII data file and convert it into a permanent SAS dataset for the particular year in the folder specified in the SAS program.

Note: Each year of SHPPS data should go in its own folder because each year has its own format library. Format libraries are not comparable across years. See Using the SAS Format Library for more information.

SAS Format Library

The SAS format library contains the formats used to make SAS output more readable. Formats are linked to the data so results are displayed as words (“Yes” or “No”, for instance) instead of numbers (1 or 2). The SAS SHPPS data files are designed to use the companion format library. You should download both the data file and the format library if you want to use SAS to analyze SHPPS data. One format library is used for all the SHPPS 2012 data, and another is used for all the SHPPS 2006 data.

The following example SAS program shows how to use the format library. It assumes that both the data file and the format library have been downloaded to “c:data”. Note that the program contains two libname statements. The first libname statement indicates where the data file is located; the second libname statement indicates where the format library is located.

General example:

libname mydata ‘c:data’; /* tells SAS where the data are */
libname library ‘c:data’; /* tells SAS where the formats are */

proc freq data=mydata.<name of SAS data file>;
tables <variable name>;

run;

SHPPS specific example using the district level health education data and running a table for the variable HED1:

libname mydata ‘c:data’; /* tells SAS where the data are */
libname library ‘c:data’; /* tells SAS where the formats are */

proc freq data=mydata hlthedd;
tables HED1;

run;

Using the format library is recommended but technically is optional. If you do not want to use the format library, include the following statement at the start of your SAS program:

options nofmterr; /* tells SAS to not look for formats */

Please note that each year of SHPPS data has its own format library.

For further information on using format libraries, please refer to the documentation provided with the SAS system.

Page last reviewed: May 15, 2015

Content source: National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and TB Prevention (NCHHSTP), Division of Adolescent and School Health (DASH)