Novel applications of linked administrative data – adding longitudinal capability and additional variables to a nationally representative survey of an indigenous population.

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Tori Diamond
Matt Edwards
Andrew Sporle

Abstract

Can linked administrative data be used to transform New Zealand's only sample survey on indigenous wellbeing into a longitudinal study?


This project extends the usefulness of an important survey dataset by linkage to admin data, effectively adding longitudinal capability within a linked administrative data source. This created robust statistical processes to transform an official statistics survey into a nationally representative cohort study.


NZ's Integrated Data Infrastructure (IDI) is a research database of administrative and survey datasets containing a range of variables linkable at the individual level. Te Kupenga is a large nationally representative post-censal survey of NZ's indigenous population (Māori) and is the only official survey with Māori culturally-informed variables. However, it is under-utilised in research.


The Te Kupenga survey was used as a foundational cohort linking to outcomes and determinants in different datasets at different time periods. Outcomes included hospitalisations and COVID-19 vaccinations, while determinants included individual, household and geographic variables. 


Linking a representative survey to admin data created issues of loss to follow-up and missing data, so the original sample is not maintained after linkage. Loss to follow-up and missingness differed depending on variable selection and time periods. So, new universally applicable weights were not possible. However, we created a robust, generally applicable process for re-weighting survey data to account for missingness and loss to follow-up in admin data. 


This project demonstrates the approach for turning a sample survey into a longitudinal cohort using admin data and creates methods that can be used for other official statistics surveys.

Article Details

How to Cite
Diamond, T., Edwards, M. and Sporle, A. (2024) “Novel applications of linked administrative data – adding longitudinal capability and additional variables to a nationally representative survey of an indigenous population”., International Journal of Population Data Science, 9(5). doi: 10.23889/ijpds.v9i5.2817.

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