May 21, 2026
Wave 2 NDWS Restricted Use Survey Files for the Community Clinician, Nursing Home, and Assisted Living surveys are now available. The Wave 2 NH and AL surveys feature a larger sample size of new participants and the first year of staff follow-ups. (A limited data set from the Home Care survey still will be released later this summer.)
In addition, researchers may now apply to complete Tier 2 restricted use projects (i.e., that do not use CMS data) on the Michigan Center on the Demography of Aging (MiCDA) Virtual Data Enclave.
Visit the How to Access Data page to learn more and apply for data access.
Wave 2 Public Use files will be released later this summer.
Important details about the Wave 2 release:
- Unlike the organizational surveys, which includes new Wave 2 samples, the Community Clinician survey continued data collection from the original Wave 1 sample. Therefor, this data release is referred to as Wave 1 FINAL and replaces last year's initial Wave 1 release.
- The Wave 2 NH and AL surveys include weights for those newly recruited organizations and staff respondents. We are preparing separate weights for researchers who want to combine the W1 and W2 data, which will be released once prepared later this summer. Until those additional weights are released, researchers should not simply combine the W1 and W2 files into one single baseline analysis.
- This data release includes new Data User Guides for the surveys (available on LINKAGE/MICDA and the NDWS website) that includes information about the sample design, instruments, data collection and guidance to appropriately weight analyses.