Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey (L.A.FANS): Effective Health Care (EHC) Data
QUESTION: How do I identify individuals who are currently uninsured?
RESPONSE:
You should use the EHC Health Insurance data for those who have an HEYEAR1=’cont’. For those that do not have EHC data, or for whom the type of insurance is missing for HEYEAR1=’cont’, then you can use the RB6 health insurance report from the Roster. Always use the EHC if you have it for health insurance since it is asked directly of the respondent. The RB6 is used only to fill in as needed since if the adult respondent was not also the roster respondent, RB6 is not self-reported.
QUESTION: In some cases in the EHC data there are overlapping dates between 2 homes – does this mean the person lived in both homes during the overlapping period or is it likely bad data?
RESPONSE:
We know there were a few cases of people who reported more than one current residence, so it’s possible that there could be some overlapping of past residences as well. Remember that our respondents are halftime or greater residents so some might have a second residence where they spend time and thus might report in the EHC.
It is always possible some overlaps on residences are due to misreported dates. Unfortunately, we have no way to tell.
If the overlap is only less than a month or a month, it may not be a real overlap and is just an artifact of how the EHC recorded thirds of months when people could not give an exact date.
QUESTION: I have a question on the date variable EHCJ5 in the Adult Public Data. For this variable, which stands for the “date moved to current residence,” I noticed that there were quite a few observations with a coding of ‘EO 3.’ I couldn’t find anything in the codebooks that explained what this might be.
RESPONSE:
The “E0 3″ is a bad date field generated by the CAPI program. We did not clean up EHCJ5, which was created by the CAPI program from the EHC data. Sometimes there were problems with the CAPI program pulling info from one module into another.
You can fill in the missing date for when the respondent moved to the current residence by looking at ASDATE1 in the EHC1 file for the current residence (the current residence is listed first in the EHC residential history section). Note that ASDATE is YYYY-MM-DD and EHCJ5 is MM-DD-YYYY in terms of how the dates are displayed.
Note that you only need to do this for those with HASEHC=1. There are records with HASEHC=0 and EHCJ5=”E0 3” which can be ignored.
QUESTION: How do some people with hasehc==0 (no EHC info.) have date values for the ehcj5 variable since that variable was created from the EHC info? Was their date of current residence gathered some other way and included as an ehcj5 value?
RESPONSE:
Adult respondents who don’t have EHC data but who did not break off at or before the EHC module are people for whom the EHC data was lost due to a computer problem after the interview was completed. Remember that the EHC is a different program than that used for the rest of the adult interview. For those people, they would have things like EHCJ5 as those would have been filled in from the EHC at the time of the interview by CAPI. It was when the case was downloaded from the laptop after the interview was completed where the loss of the collected EHC data occurred.