title: Synthetic estimates of work loss disability for each state and the District of Columbia.
abstract: A method of synthetic estimation of health characteristics for local areas, devised by the National Center of Health Statistics, was evaluated in a recent study. In the method, local data on population are combined with national data on a given health characteristic to produce an indirect estimate of that characteristic. The health characteristic selected in the study was that of complete and partial work loss disability. Therefore, synthetic estimates of complete and partial work loss disability were calculated for each State by combining the estimated rates of such disability for the United States, specific to a set of demographic domains, with the data relating to the distribution of each State into this set of demographic domains. The synthetic estimates of complete and partial work loss disability for each State were then compared with the direct estimates available from the 1970 decennial census. For partial work loss disability, agreement between the synthetic and the direct estimates, as judged by the median percentage absolute difference, was fairly good; for complete work loss disability, agreement was rather poor. On the other hand, the correlation between the synthetic and the direct estimates was higher for complete work loss disability than for partial, partly because the synthetic estimates had a greater spread for complete work disability than for partial. The skewness of the distributions of the squared differences indicates that the evaluation based on median percentage absolute differences was more descriptive than the one based on mean square errors.
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D003710:Demography; D004185:Disability Evaluation; D005260:Female; D006305:Health Status Indicators; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D013223:Statistics as Topic; D014481:United States