Reweighting national survey data for small area behaviour estimates: modelling alcohol consumption in Local Authorities in England

Robert Pryce,Matt Hickman,Alan Brennan,Frank De Vocht,John Holmes,Colin Angus,Petra Meier,Penny Buykx,Duncan Gillespie

doi:10.1186/s12963-019-0201-0

Robert Pryce, Matt Hickman + Show 7 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1186/s12963-019-0201-0

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Abstract

BackgroundThere are likely to be differences in alcohol consumption levels and patterns across local areas within a country, yet survey data is often collected at the national or sub-national/regional level and is not representative for small geographic areas.MethodsThis paper presents a method for reweighting national survey data—the Health Survey for England—by combining survey and routine data to produce simulated locally representative survey data and provide statistics of alcohol consumption for each Local Authority in England.ResultsWe find a 2-fold difference in estimated mean alcohol consumption between the lightest and heaviest drinking Local Authorities, a 4.5-fold difference in abstention rates, and a 3.5-fold difference in harmful drinking. The method compares well to direct estimates from the data at regional level.ConclusionsThe results have important policy implications in itself, but the reweighted data can also be used to model local policy effects. This method can also be used for other public health small area estimation where locally representative data are not available.

Highlights

There are likely to be differences in alcohol consumption levels and patterns across local areas within a country, yet survey data is often collected at the national or sub-national/regional level and is not representative for small geographic areas
Whilst harm data are often available at local level from routinely collected records on deaths and hospital admissions, data on health behaviours usually come from government-funded large-scale surveys, which are representative only at the national, or some other large geographical, level
The method we present in this paper goes beyond creating synthetic point estimates of alcohol consumption; \instead, it reweights individual-level survey data to make it representative of the local area’s sociodemographic characteristics and expected alcohol consumption

Summary

Introduction

There are likely to be differences in alcohol consumption levels and patterns across local areas within a country, yet survey data is often collected at the national or sub-national/regional level and is not representative for small geographic areas. Whilst harm data are often available at local level from routinely collected records on deaths and hospital admissions, data on health behaviours usually come from government-funded large-scale surveys, which are representative only at the national, or some other large geographical, level The implication of this is that, given the small samples, direct estimation of small area characteristics is not possible for each area, posing a challenge to policymakers wanting to know the pattern of health behaviours in their locality. Alcohol consumption has previously been estimated at the local level, producing synthetic estimates of the proportion of the population who are abstainers and lower risk, increasing risk or higher risk drinkers within English Local Authorities [4]

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