Contributions to Survey Methods

• Activity Number: 166
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Monday, August 2, 2010 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Government Statistics
• Author(s): Margaret Devers Carroll*+ and Lester Randolph Curtin
• Companies: National Center for Health Statistics and CDC
• Keywords: Balance Repeated replication ; Taylor Series Linearization ; Multiple lmputation ; Data swapping ; SUDAAN ; STATA

Abstract

The National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys (NHANES) provide valuable information on the health of the United States through direct, standardized, physical measurements and self-reported data. Due to the complex nature of the data, statistical analysis has proven challenging. The need to resolve these analytic complications has lead to innovation in a number of areas. This talk summarizes influence of NHANES on the development of statistical techniques to analyze data from a complex survey, to handle potential non-response bias and to minimize disclosure risk. Specific topics include the formulation of unbiased and consistent variance estimates, test statistics for survey data, methods used to adjust for non-response, analytic methods for rare events and the indirect use of NHANES data in the development of statistical software, e.g. SUDAAN and STATA.