Update
Notes
MEPS
NHC-001: Round 1 Sampled Facility and Person Characteristics,
March 1997 (AHCPR97-DP21)
Update #1: March 1997 Calculation
of Standard Errors
As described in the documentation of the public use files for
the nursing home component (NHC) of MEPS, STRATM7Y and BASEID
are included
in these files for use in adjusting for the clustered sample
design when calculating standard errors of estimates. This
note provides
further information for this purpose.
When calculating standard errors at the facility level, only the
variable STRATM7Y is needed as the stratification variable. When
calculating standard errors at the person level, the variable STRATM7Y
is to be used as the stratum variable, and BASEID is to be used
as the first stage sampling unit nested within a stratum.
Estimates Derived from Public Use Files
As described in the documentation of the public use files for the
nursing home component (NHC) of MEPS, and in order to preserve
the confidentiality of the sample, some "noise" was
added to most variables measuring bedsize and numbers of residents,
and some recoding was done to several other variables. For these
reasons, statistics calculated using these variables from public
use files may not correspond exactly to those presented in MEPS
NHC findings and highlights. Data that are being prepared for
publication that have sufficient reliability (in terms of cell
size and relative standard error) were calculated using both
the original data and the public use data. In all these cases
examined to date, including some descriptive statistics that
divide the sample according to bedsize, the difference was less
than 5 percent, an amount generally not significant in terms
of the sampling error.
Information
for PC-SAS Users
Note: When doing PC-SAS conversion of ASCII data files, users
must specify the LRECL in the INFILE statement, due to
the fact that
PC-SAS uses a default LRECL value of 256. Below are sample
INFILE statements to be used with the data files contained
on the MEPS
CD-ROM NHC-001:
For the data file NHC001F1.DAT: 'INFILE IN1 LRECL=576 RECFM=F;'
For the data file NHC001F2.DAT: 'INFILE IN1 LRECL=966 RECFM=F;'
Errata
Two errors were noted in the MEPS Nursing Home Component Person-Level
Codebook. The variable description for BCSMEMST (page 61 of the
Public Use File Person-Level Codebook) should read as follows:
Was there a problem with short-term memory loss? The variable
description for BCSMEMLT (also on page 61 of Public Use File
Person-Level Codebook) should read as follows: Was there a problem
with long term memory loss?
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