The Impact of Environment and Occupation on the Health and Safety of Active Duty Air Force Members - Database Development and De-Identification

The overall goal of this project is to analyze environmental and occupational factors that affect risk-taking behaviors and health outcomes among active duty U.S. Air Force personnel. Due to the complexity of this database, additional data cleaning, database linking, and de-identification procedures were performed. With the complete database, investigators will be able to explore the general hypothesis that environmental and occupational factors influence both health outcomes and risk-taking behavior of service members in certain career fields, with identification of high-risk career fields for targeted interventions. Additionally, low-risk career fields could be identified for potential protective factors. The result of this project is a comprehensive database that was formatted, cleaned, and de-identified that will enable investigators to highlight environmental and occupational factors specific to the Air Force that impact health and safety outcomes. New variables were created to capture subject characteristics from the Preventive Health Assessment data and to explore rating chain relationships between subjects and their effect on the health and safety of active duty Air Force personnel. In addition, descriptive analyses were performed on the complete data. Phase II database analysis will continue for this project. The purpose of this report is to document the data cleaning, database linking, and de-identification steps taken to build the database prior to analysis.