Combined-year State-level Public Use Files and Single-year Nation-level PUFs from the National Survey of Drug Use and Health Data

• Activity Number: 69
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Monday, August 9, 2004 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Section on Survey Research Methods
• Author(s): Douglas Wright*+ and Avinash Singh
• Companies: SAMHSA and RTI International
• Keywords: MASSC method ; random substitution ; random subsampling

Abstract

Since 1999, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) has provided yearly National PUFs for NSDUH data using a procedure based on the MASSC (Micro Agglomeration, Substitution, Subsampling, and Calibration) system for statistical disclosure limitation. There is a growing demand for state-level data, and SAMHSA is considering providing state-level PUFs based on combining several years of NSDUH data. We explore various concerns and approaches to state-level PUFs and indicate how MASSC could address some of them. Releasing combined-year state-level PUFs along side single-year national PUFs poses several challenges. The most important one is that confidentiality of an individual could be compromised if an intruder is able to match the state-level PUFs with the national PUFs on the basis of various sensitive variables that are typically not perturbed, and thus may succeed in attaching state identifiers to the national PUFs. This problem can be reduced by taking advantage of the randomness in perturbation and suppression used in MASSC.