Re:U.S. life expectancy varies by more than 20 years from co...
by dredmorbius on Monday May 08, 2017 @04:50PM
(#14295478)
A major problem in any demographics research is data coding. For health-related demographics, HIPPA starts playing in.
Because mailing address is almost always provided in a healthcare setting, ZIP Code data are present in records. Similarly for coronor or death reports. Other alternatives, say, census block number, exist, but would have to be coded into the data. If you're already working with ZIP rollup data, you simply cannot recode for finer-grained analysis.
The most obvious data target would be the ZIP+4 encoding, though here in a provider context you'd likely run into HIPPA concerns (I've not worked in the field for some years). For death reports, that's obviated, so access to county death records at household detail would be an option, but you'd need to acquire data across all (or some sampling of) the 3,144 counties in the US.
Some of that data may be available in electronic form, but I'd suspect some level of fieldwork might still be required.
Because mailing address is almost always provided in a healthcare setting, ZIP Code data are present in records. Similarly for coronor or death reports. Other alternatives, say, census block number, exist, but would have to be coded into the data. If you're already working with ZIP rollup data, you simply cannot recode for finer-grained analysis.
The most obvious data target would be the ZIP+4 encoding, though here in a provider context you'd likely run into HIPPA concerns (I've not worked in the field for some years). For death reports, that's obviated, so access to county death records at household detail would be an option, but you'd need to acquire data across all (or some sampling of) the 3,144 counties in the US.
Some of that data may be available in electronic form, but I'd suspect some level of fieldwork might still be required.