Operational definition of disability in the National Long Term Care Survey PI: Elena A Erosheva                RA: Natalie Thompson National Long Term Care Survey began in 1982 and now extends over six waves through 2004. It provides an important source of information on possible changes in disability over time among the elderly Americans. The NLTCS data on basic and instrumental activities of daily living have been used to generate some major findings such as showing a decline in chronic disability among the elderly Americans. However, complexity of the design, influenced by many decisions made in the early years of the survey, presents conceptual and analytic challenges for secondary users of the NLTCS data. In particular, the operational definition of chronic disability employed by the NLTCS is difficult to track down comprehensively. The primary aims of this project are to develop a comprehensive description of the operational definition of chronic disability used in the NLTCS and to investigate the impact of the design choices made by the NLTCS on the measurement of chronic disability.

 

Documenting the operational definition of chronic disability used by the NLTCS Based on the survey questionnaires for 2004, we derived sets of triggering questions for determination of binary outcomes on key disability variables (basic and instrumental activities of daily living, ADL and IADL). Screen interview ADL triggering questions and  IADL triggering questions;  Detailed interview ADL triggering questions and IADL triggering questions. Our sets of triggering questions describe exact disability measures from the NLTCS: one that is based on screen interviews and another one that is based on detailed interviews.  The former Center for Demographic Studies at Duke University (CDS-Duke) provided sets of triggering questions for basic and instrumental activities of daily living for the Analytic File (a file of derived variables for all waves of the survey used in research and that incorporates correction factors and consistency checking based on analyses of CDS-Duke).

 

Presentations and publications E. A. Erosheva and T. White. “On the operational definition of chronic disability in the National Long Term Care Survey, 1982-2004” (poster) University of Washington Geriatric Research Forum, Seattle, WA, September 9, 2008. E. A. Erosheva and T. A. White. “Issues in survey measurement of chronic disability measurement: An example from the National Long Term Care Survey,” Journal of Official Statistics, 26(2):317-339. E. A. Erosheva and T. White. Operational definition of chronic disability in the National Long Term Care Survey: Problems and Suggestions. Working paper (2006). Last updated: September 29, 2010.

Funded by National Institute on Aging 1R03AG030605-01.