Speakers:
Stephanie Zimmer, Senior Research Statistician, RTI International
Steve Salerno, Assistant Professor, University of Washington at St. Louis
Timing: Friday, July 17 from 12:00pm - 1:30pm ET
Format: Online (Via Zoom)
Description: INTERSECTIONS is a new opportunity for ASA sections to provide discussions on topics that have crosssection interest. This joint webinar organized by the Survey Research Methods Section and Health Policy Statistics Section provides an overview of the survey methodology behind the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) and a recent policy analysis based on NHANES data. This joint webinar aims at providing an intersection of survey methodology and health policy to members of both sections and beyond.
The first speaker, Stephanie Zimmer, will give a crash course in the NHANES design and using the public use files. Stephanie will focus on the NHANES design and statistical methods including weighting estimation of the most recent cycles, as well as how to easily access the data in R and how to quickly go from getting the data to analyses, accompanied by several R packages including nhanesA, srvyr, and gtsummary. The second speaker, Steve Salerno, will present a recent work with co-authors on the topic of “What’s the Weight? Estimating Controlled Outcome Differences in Complex Surveys for Health Disparities Research”. In this work, Steve and co-authors proposed methods to properly estimate the average controlled difference in telomere length between Black and White individuals after accounting for socioeconomic conditions and related structural factors, tackling the challenge the sampling weights in NHANES depending in part on self-reported race where standard propensity score and survey weighting approaches do not apply without modification.