Evaluating the Utility of Linked Administrative Data for Nonresponse Bias Adjustment in a Piggyback Longitudinal Survey

Nearly all panel surveys suffer from unit nonresponse and the risk of nonresponse bias. Just as the analytic value of panel surveys increase with their length, so does cumulative attrition, which can adversely affect the representativeness of the resulting survey estimates. Auxiliary data can be useful for monitoring and adjusting for attrition bias, but traditional auxiliary sources have known limitations. We investigate the utility of linked-administrative data to adjust for attrition bias in a standard piggyback longitudinal design, where respondents from a preceding general population cross-sectional survey, which included a data linkage request, were recruited for a subsequent longitudinal survey. Using the linked-administrative data from the preceding survey, we estimate attrition biases for the first eight study waves of the longitudinal survey and investigate whether an augmented weighting scheme that incorporates the linked-administrative data reduces attrition biases. We find that adding the administrative information to the weighting scheme generally leads to a modest reduction in attrition bias compared to a standard weighting procedure and, in some cases, reduces variation in the point estimates. We conclude with a discussion of these results and remark on the practical implications of incorporating linked-administrative data in piggyback longitudinal designs.

Deriving household composition using population-scale electronic health record data—A reproducible methodology

Background Physical housing and household composition have an important role in the lives of individuals and drive health and social outcomes, and inequalities. Most methods to understand housing composition are based on survey or census data, and there is currently no reproducible methodology for creating population-level household composition measures using linked administrative data. Methods Using existing, and more recent enhancements to the address-data linkage methods in the SAIL Databank using Residential Anonymised Linking Fields we linked individuals to properties using the anonymised Welsh Demographic Service data in the SAIL Databank. We defined households, household size, and household composition measures based on adult to child relationships, and age differences between residents to create relative age measures. Results Two relative age-based algorithms were developed and returned similar results when applied to population and household-level data, describing household composition for 3.1 million individuals within 1.2 million households in Wales. Developed methods describe binary, and count level generational household composition measures. Conclusions Improved residential anonymised linkage field methods in SAIL have led to improved property-level data linkage, allowing the design and application of household composition measures that assign individuals to shared residences and allow the description of household composition across Wales. The reproducible methods create longitudinal, household-level composition measures at a population-level using linked administrative data. Such measures are important to help understand more detail about an individual’s home and area environment and how that may affect the health and wellbeing of the individual, other residents, and potentially into the wider community.

Infant Health, Cognitive Performance and Earnings: Evidence from Inception of the Welfare State in Sweden

We identify earnings impacts of exposure to an infant health intervention in Sweden, using individual linked administrative data to trace potential mechanisms. Leveraging quasirandom variation in eligibility, we estimate that exposure was associated with higher test scores in primary school for boys and girls. However only girls were more likely to score in the top quintile. Subsequent gains, in secondary schooling, employment, and earnings, are restricted to girls. We show that the differential gains for women accrued from both skills and opportunities.

Academic Achievement of Children in Same- and Different-Sex-Parented Families: A Population-Level Analysis of Linked Administrative Data From the Netherlands

Although numerous studies have examined how children raised in same-sex-parented families fare relative to children in different-sex-parented families, this body of work suffers from major methodological shortcomings. By leveraging linked administrative data from several population registers from the Netherlands covering the 2006–2018 period (n = 1,454,577), we overcome most methodological limitations affecting earlier research. The unique features of the data include complete population coverage, reliable identification of same-sex-parented families, a large number of children in same-sex-parented families (n = 3,006), multiple objective and verifiable educational outcomes, and detailed measures of family dynamics over children's entire life courses. The results indicate that children in same-sex-parented families outperform children in different-sex-parented families on multiple indicators of academic performance, including standardized tests scores, high school graduation rates, and college enrollment. Such advantages extend to both male and female children, and are more pronounced among children in female than male same-sex-parented families. These findings challenge deficit models of same-sex parenting.