Data Availability

The survey public use data and documentation from BTS' 2002 National Transportation Availability and Use Survey will be posted to its Web site at: http://www.bts.gov/omnibus/targeted/index.html

As described in the "Sample Design" section of this report, the survey used a two-staged respondent selection process. The first (or "screener") stage was at the household level and the second (or "extended interview") stage was at the person level. Please note that the public use data file consists of person level records. For this reason, the counts produced from this data set are person-level rather than household-level figures. Also, because this is a person file, with only individual-level weights, many of the household-level screener variables asked at the first stage are not applicable at the person level and, therefore, do not appear in the public use data file. This includes the ADA disability questions. However, if either of the screener-level ADA items were the sole basis for identifying a person with a disability for an extended interview, this was reflected in the construction of the TDISABLD variable.

The documentation includes user notes, a codebook/data dictionary, and frequency tables for each item.

In addition to the different types of information contained in the data files, they are provided in these formats:

• SAS 8.0 format, including label statements (variable and value labels),
• SPSS 10.0 format,
• Microsoft Excel for Windows, and
• ASCII comma delimited.

BTS makes the public use data available for analytical use by anyone without prior permission from BTS, but does require that any publications using the data acknowledge the Bureau of Transportation Statistics as the data source.

Please e-mail a copy of any published analyses that use this survey's data to David Smallen, the BTS Public Information Officer, at: David.Smallen@bts.gov

BTS plans to continue to analyze the survey data and will develop Issue Briefs from the data for selected topics of interest. These can be accessed through this BTS Web site address as they become available: www.bts.gov/publications/issue_brief.