Assessing data quality and under-coverage in administrative sources
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Insights from assessing data quality and under-coverage in administrative sources
IRAS ID
207972
Contact name
Brian Foley
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
Queen's University Belfast
Clinicaltrials.gov Identifier
N/A, N/A
Duration of Study in the UK
1 years, 0 months, 1 days
Research summary
This research has two strands. Firstly, from the perspective of administrative data quality, the broad aim is to assess the accuracy of address information in the health-card register (HCR) and electoral register (ER) in Northern Ireland (NI). Secondly, in terms of public health, the level of health-card registration among migrants and other Minority Ethnic Groups (MEGs) to obtain access to primary care services (e.g. general practitioners and dentists) in NI will be assessed.
The accuracy of address information in administrative data sources is important, particularly where it serves a particular operational or statistical purpose. Address information in the HCR is used by the main screening programmes for identifying and issuing invitations to members of the target population, e.g. women in the 50 to 70 age group for breast screening. Data on address changes in the HCR are used to estimate internal migration in NI, which is an important component of the mid-year population estimates; these data are used widely including by national and local government for resource planning and allocation. Meanwhile, the ER relies on accurate address information for polling cards to be issued to registered voters in advance of an election, which is a fundamental component of the democratic process. The proposed research aims to conduct a detailed quality assessment of record-level address information, based on anonymised property reference number, in the aforementioned administrative sources using the 2011 Census of NI as a source of reference address information.
In addition, analysis of under-coverage in the HCR will provide an insight on the level of registration to access primary care services by migrants and other MEGs in NI. It is important to investigate if barriers such as language difficulties are associated with non-registration for a health card within the aforementioned groups, so that measures can be targeted to address these issues.REC name
North East - York Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
16/NE/0177
Date of REC Opinion
24 May 2016
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion