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American Journal of Epidemiology Advance Access originally published online on May 23, 2008
American Journal of Epidemiology 2008 168(3):336-344; doi:10.1093/aje/kwn123
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American Journal of Epidemiology Published by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health 2008.

PRACTICE OF EPIDEMIOLOGY

The Public-Use National Health Interview Survey Linked Mortality Files: Methods of Reidentification Risk Avoidance and Comparative Analysis

Kimberly Lochner1, Robert A. Hummer2, Stephanie Bartee1, Gloria Wheatcroft1 and Christine Cox1

1 Office of Analysis and Epidemiology, National Center for Health Statistics, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Hyattsville, MD
2 Population Research Center, Department of Sociology, University of Texas, Austin, TX

Correspondence to Dr. Kimberly Lochner, Office of Analysis and Epidemiology, National Center for Health Statistics, 3311 Toledo Road, Hyattsville, MD 20782 (e-mail: KLochner{at}cdc.gov).

Received for publication January 2, 2008. Accepted for publication April 9, 2008.

The National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) conducts mortality follow-up for its major population-based surveys. In 2004, NCHS updated the mortality follow-up for the 1986–2000 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) years, which because of confidentiality protections was made available only through the NCHS Research Data Center. In 2007, NCHS released a public-use version of the NHIS Linked Mortality Files that includes a limited amount of perturbed information for decedents. The modification of the public-use version included conducting a reidentification risk scenario to determine records at risk for reidentification and then imputing values for either date or cause of death for a select sample of records. To demonstrate the comparability between the public-use and restricted-use versions of the linked mortality files, the authors estimated relative hazards for all-cause and cause-specific mortality risk using a Cox proportional hazards model. The pooled 1986–2000 NHIS Linked Mortality Files contain 1,576,171 records and 120,765 deaths. The sample for the comparative analyses included 897,232 records and 114,264 deaths. The comparative analyses show that the two data files yield very similar results for both all-cause and cause-specific mortality. Analytical considerations when examining cause-specific analyses of numerically small demographic subgroups are addressed.

confidentiality; epidemiologic methods; health surveys; longitudinal studies; mortality

Abbreviations: CI, confidence interval; HR, hazard ratio; ICD, International Statistical Classification of Diseases, Injuries, and Causes of Death; NCHS, National Center for Health Statistics; NHIS, National Health Interview Survey


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