Accuracy of Commercially Available Residential Histories for Epidemiologic Studies

Abstract

A key problem facing epidemiologists who wish to account for residential mobility in their analyses is the cost and difficulty of obtaining residential histories. Commercial residential history data of acceptable accuracy, cost, and coverage would be of great value. The present research evaluated the accuracy of residential histories from LexisNexis, Inc. The authors chose LexisNexis because the Michigan Cancer Registry has considered using their data, they have excellent procedures for privacy protection, and they make available residential histories at 25 cents per person. Only first and last name and address at last-known residence are required to access the residential history. The authors compared lifetime residential histories collected through the use of written surveys in a case-control study of bladder cancer in Michigan to the 3 residential addresses routinely available in the address history from LexisNexis. The LexisNexis address matches, as a whole, accounted for 71.5% of participants' lifetime addresses. These results provided a level of accuracy that indicates routine use of residential histories from commercial vendors is feasible. More detailed residential histories are available at a higher cost but were not analyzed in this study. Although higher accuracy is desirable, LexisNexis data are a vast improvement over the assumption of immobile individuals currently used in many spatial and spatiotemporal studies.

The utility of EMR address histories for assessing neighborhood exposures

“…Our study presents novel information regarding the utility of EMR address histories for determining longitudinal environmental and neighborhood exposure, and fits with other studies that employed different methods to recover longitudinal environmental exposure information [2,42]. Within a large, mature, integrated EMR, we explored the effects of collection bias for location-based measures of environmental exposure using a survey designed to detect differences in participant’s EMR-derived versus true (self-report) recent address history.…”

Assessing bias associated with geocoding of historical residence in epidemiology research

“…In addition, it reduces the likelihood of bias being introduced by missing data related to geocoding and related geospatial methods used in epidemiological research. Given the significance of early-life and lifetime exposures in chronic disease epidemiology, more effective methods for geocoding of historical residence need to be developed, including further development of imputation methods for missing residence data and utilization of other sources to validate and complement self-reported historical residence information (Curriero et al, 2010;Jacquez et al, 2011).…”

Using address histories in health research

“…The use of either presents notable disadvantages; purchasing complete address histories from commercial sources may be prohibitively expensive, while administrative records are not typically designed to be historical records and may not store address history data (i.e. data are over-written) [6]. Perhaps more importantly, use of secondary sources presents data integration challenges.…”