This codebook documents data sets describing motor vehicle accidents involving fatal injuries that occurred in the United States during the calendar year of 2008. This dataset is labelled version 18Jun09 2008 file and is the final reported version. The data sets were developed by the Transportation Data Center from data supplied by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and collected through NHTSA's Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS). The cooperation of NHTSA in providing the data is gratefully acknowledged. FARS is a computerized data base maintained by NHTSA that contains information on fatal motor vehicle traffic accidents occurring in the fifty states and the District of Columbia. Each accident in FARS includes at least one fatality that happened on a trafficway. The data for FARS are provided by the states and reported in a standard format. The data obtained from NHTSA have been reformatted into five distinct data sets for use with the Data Center's Accident Data Access and Analysis System. The characteristics of the system data sets are given in the table below. Relational data sets for the five record types with extensions made by the Data Center are maintained, however, and other final data set configurations can be generated. The information used to generate the data sets described in the table represents NHTSA's Version 18Jun09 of the 2008 FARS. The copy was made in July 2009. In the following codebook, code categories found with no label indicate code values that do not have a valid value in the NHTSA supplied documentation. The codebook itself is divided into four sections that document the accident, vehicle, occupant, and non-motorist records respectively. Univariate frequencies and frequency percentages displayed in each section are from the corresponding data set. For example, frequencies for the vehicle variables (101-178) are derived from FARS07VH. (Author/publisher) This report may be accessed by Internet users at http://www.umtri.umich.edu/content/Fars2008.pdf
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