This dataset was generated during a repeated cross-sectional national telephone survey of households, conducted as part of the evaluation of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Urban Health Initiative (UHI). UHI is a long-term effort to improve the health, safety, and well-being of children and youth in five economically distressed cities in the United States: Baltimore, MD, Detroit, MI, Oakland, CA, Philadelphia, PA, and Richmond, VA.

The UHI Survey of Adults and Youth (SAY) included a variety of questions, asked of both parents and their 10-18 year old children, regarding children's health, safety, perceptions of neighborhoods and schools, family relations, quality of city services, and other issues. SAY surveyed 3 types of households (households without children, households with children aged 0-9 years, and households with children aged 10-18 years) in up to 14 geographic areas, including the 5 UHI program cities, 9 comparison cities demographically similar to the UHI cities, the suburban regions of these cities, the most populous 100 United States cities, and the rest of the country. There were 3 waves of data collection during the following school years: 1998-1999, 2001-2002, and 2004-2005. There is a separate data file for each wave, and each record contains all of the data for a given household.