The Development of State Estimates from a National Health Survey

• Activity Number: 129
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Monday, August 1, 2011 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Section on Survey Research Methods
• Author(s): Wendy Van de Kerckhove*+ and Robert E. Fay and Leyla K. Mohadjer and Lester R. Curtin
• Companies: Westat Inc. and Westat Inc. and Westat Inc. and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
• Keywords: Small area estimation ; NHANES ; CHIS

Abstract

The National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) is an on-going survey of the United States population that collects health and nutrition information through medical examinations. The support of the sampled communities is beneficial in obtaining cooperation from sampled persons and setting up mobile examination centers in the area. To provide valuable information to the communities and extend the usefulness of the NHANES data, NCHS, the survey's sponsor, decided to support research to develop local area estimates. This paper describes the method used to produce estimates for the state of California. The method needed to address the challenges of producing state estimates from a national survey, combining multiple years of data from different sample designs, and allowing estimation of multiple characteristics of interest. To produce estimates for multiple characteristics, we developed an approach to produce weights for NHANES sample cases in CA during the period 1999-2006. We report on a quasi-design-based approach we developed to combine data from the non-self-representing PSUs that had been sampled under two different stratification designs.