I decided today to finally start looking into going on writing my thesis. I thought the China Health and Nutrition Survey had published the 2011 dataset, but no such luck for income (which is kind of crucial for what I want to do). The newest is the 2009 one, which I had decided against last year, as it does not have the self-assessed health indicator.
Before I found all of that out, I first had to find a way to access the data, which is in a SAS file format, which R can't open (proprietary software formats and all that). The woes of people without University resources. Anyway, with the help of wine and some windows command line program I managed to open the file. This converter does not mess up the . and , , which is nice, because I had to check all the dataset with the converter actually developed by SAS last time as it did not always read the , making some of my Chinese workers trillionaires.
Anyway, the question remains, find a new health indicator or use old data? Fortunately by now more research on the 2009 data has been published by now so I can do some reading, if (and this might be my next frustration) I can access the articles.
Life was easier when I had access to University libraries and computers.