Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jun 20, 2026

Inverse Probability of Treatment Weighting (Propensity Score) using the Military Health System Data Repository and National Death Index
Published on: January 8, 2020
Measurement issues associated with using survey data matched with administrative data from the Social Security
1Division of Policy Evaluation, Office of Research, Evaluation, and Statistics, Office of Retirement and Disability Policy, Social Security Administration, USA.
Abstract:
Researchers using survey data matched with administrative data benefit from the rich demographic and economic detail available from survey data combined with detailed programmatic data from administrative records. The research benefits of using these matched data are too numerous to mention. But there are drawbacks as well, and those drawbacks have received less systematic attention from researchers. We focus on survey data matched with administrative data from the Social Security Administration and address the strengths and weaknesses of each in four specific areas: (1) program participation and benefits, (2) disability and health information, (3) earnings, and (4) deferred compensation. We discuss the implications of these strengths and weaknesses for decisions that researchers must make regarding the appropriate data source and definition for the concepts in question. From this discussion, some general conclusions are drawn about measurement issues associated with using matched survey and administrative data for research, policy evaluation, and statistics.
Related Concept Videos
Surveys
Data Collection by Survey
Data Collection by Observations
An astronomer viewing the motion and brightness of stars in the sky and recording the data is an example of observational data collection. A botanist recording...
Errors and Mistakes in Surveying
Statistical Analysis: Overview
One of the most commonly used statistical quantifiers is the mean, which is the ratio between the sum of the numerical values of all results and the...
Ordinal Level of Measurement
Data measured using an ordinal scale are similar to nominal scale data, but there is one major difference. The ordinal scale data can be ordered. An example of ordinal scale data is a list of the top five national parks in the...