Recent actions have highlighted how quickly data collected with taxpayer dollars can be restricted. For the last three decades, data from the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBSS) have provided critical information as to levels and trends in key areas of adolescent health and well-being nationally. To ensure continued access to such data, we developed an open-source data package that cleans and stores YRBSS data from 2015 to 2023 (Cañizares & Cardozo, 2025).
Since 2023, this package has provided researchers with a streamlined way to work with YRBSS data, eliminating the need for SPSS or SAS licenses and complex syntax. Users can effortlessly download datasets from 2015 to 2023 in CSV, SPSS, or Parquet format. Additionally, the package offers a cleaner version of the data with more intuitive variable names and the ability to merge multiple years smoothly. We are also introducing user-friendly data dictionaries for each year to enhance usability.
In the coming weeks, we plan to expand functionalities and improve documentation, making this package not just a reliable data repository—free from interference—but also a valuable resource for researchers and the public.
