Can We Hit the Mark? Using Commercial and Publicly Available Data to Target Specific Populations

• Activity Number: 35
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Sunday, August 9, 2015 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Survey Research Methods Section
• Author(s): Ned English* and Alicia Frasier and Trent Buskirk and Davod Malarek
• Companies: NORC at the University of Chicago and NORC at the University of Chicago and Marketing Systems Group and MSG
• Keywords: Hard-to-reach populations ; Sensitivity ; Positive predictivity ; ABS ; Appended information

Abstract

Health surveys estimating child wellness often face challenges efficiently identifying households with certain characteristics, including having individuals in a specific age range. Companies specializing in creating targeted lists, such as Marketing Systems Group (MSG), can compile information from various data sources to potentially-flag households believed to have children of specific ages. Such a task is challenging for reasons including the time-lag necessary for births to appear in vital records and the fact that children are not direct purchasers as are adults and therefore may not yield salient consumer data. Marketers have access to large quantities of transactional information, which may correlate with the presence of children and serve as alternative indicators. We examine the utility of such information to indicate the presence of young children in households in LA County, based on screening data from a multi-mode ABS sample. Our study reveals whether these "signals" can positively predict the presence of young children. We examine the sensitivity and specificity of these indicators and evaluate how useful they could be in identifying such households in the future.