397 – Analysis and Weighting of Health Survey Data Involving Record Linkage
Linking Medical Expenditure Panel Survey to the National Health Interview Survey: Weighting and Estimation Considerations
Sadeq Chowdhury
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality
Steve Machlin
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality
Lap-Ming Wun
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality
The Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) is an annual survey with an overlapping panel design where the sample for a panel is drawn from the responding households of the previous year's National Health Interview Survey (NHIS). Because of this relationship between the two surveys, data from the NHIS can be linked to the MEPS to expand the survey's analytic capacity. However, as the MEPS is conducted a year after conducting the NHIS, not all persons in a MEPS sample can be linked with the NHIS sample due to the joining of new persons in some households. Options for analyzing such a linked dataset are to exclude the cases with missing NHIS data and apply the original MEPS weight, exclude the cases with missing NHIS data and apply an adjusted MEPS weight, or impute missing values so that the full dataset can be analyzed using the original MEPS weight. This paper presents the results of an investigation on the importance of weighting adjustments for analysis and estimation when MEPS is linked with the NHIS core, sample adult or sample child files.
