Current Records Linkage Research and Practice at the U.S. Census Bureau

• Activity Number: 68
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Sunday, August 1, 2010 : 4:00 PM to 5:50 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Survey Research Methods
• Author(s): Dean Resnick*+ and Dean Resnick
• Companies: U.S. Census Bureau and U.S. Census Bureau
• Keywords: record linkage ; ACS ; Administrative Records

Abstract

The identification of American Community Survey respondents allows survey responses to be linked to administrative record files for analysis of response error and other purposes. Currently the Census Bureau uses a record linkage technique that compares a weighted sum of several comparisons (e.g., first name, year-of-birth, etc.) to a match threshold, deeming those record pairs exceeding the threshold to be valid matches. While this technique allows over 90% identification of respondents, it can potentially be improved by taking advantage of the relative frequency of names, dates-of-birth, place-of-birth etc. to compute the likelihood of spurious agreement across fields. Knowing the likelihood of spurious matches allows a computation of an estimated likelihood that pairs of records from the two files that are being matched together truly represent the same individual.