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Abstract:
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Recent decades have witnessed an explosion of administrative data due to digital transformation which creates new research opportunities. However, like other types of data, administrative data can carry various types of errors that limit its use. Although the literature has developed theoretical frameworks for quality assessment of administrative data, implementing them to identify errors in real data and developing corresponding strategies to enhance the data quality requires empirical tests and continuous improvement. We will illustrate our experience in enhancing the quality of an administrative database collected from a national incident-based crime-reporting system in the US. In this work, several special features of administrative data that are not fully discussed in the theoretical frameworks are considered, such as: the hierarchical structure of administrative data, the importance to address errors made by large reporting agencies, and the sources of differences between administrative data and survey data when comparing their estimates for validation purpose. This discussion will help one learn how to plan for their data quality enhancement work.
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