Past RWJF Workshops

Our panel of experts discussed the landscape of rules and regulations that provide guidance – and sometimes confusion – on the collection of racial and ethnic information in a variety of health data sources from national surveys to state health departments to hospital level data.

Presenters included: Ignatius Bau, JD, Health Policy Consultant; Sarah Scholle, Dr.PH, Vice President of Research and Analytics, National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA); and Jennifer Park, PhD, Study Director, Committee on National Statistics, National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

This presentation will review several commonly used statistical disclosure limitation (SDL) techniques that are used to protect sensitive government data. In addition to this review, the presenter will demonstrate these techniques in practice by presenting several case studies. Finally, the presenter will share several useful resources that the audience can refer to for further guidance on available techniques used to protect its data.

Presenters: Jacqueline Lucas, Health Statistician/Epidemiologist, National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), and Neil Ruiz, Associate Director of Global Migration and Demography, Pew Research Center
As more surveys and other health data sources want to allow respondents to identify with the multiple races that reflect their identity, data managers are working on the strategies for developing the best question wording, tabulation methods, and dissemination strategies to most accurately reflect the population. Neil Ruiz will discuss trends in capturing multiracial identity and the implications for researchers. Jacqueline Lucas will share trends in federal health surveys, such as the National Health Interview Survey, and how data is processed, and how researchers can access racial/ethnic data in public use files as well as a federal Research Data Center (RDC) locations.

This webinar will discuss the ways in which survey weighting processes can and cannot be used to improve the representativeness of data on small and disaggregated populations within population surveys. Presentations will cover the purpose of providing survey weights that account for specific subpopulations, things to consider when selecting a control population to use for calibration, and methods of accounting for small subgroups in weighting data.

This Workshop covers two topics:

• Strategies in Mitigating Disclosure Risk in Disaggregated Racial/Ethnic Data
• User Experience Accessing Disaggregated Racial/Ethnic Data

This presentation will review several commonly used statistical disclosure limitation (SDL) techniques that are used to protect sensitive government data.  In addition to this review, the presenter will demonstrate these techniques in practice by presenting several case studies.  Finally, the presenter will share several useful resources that the audience can refer to for further guidance on available techniques used to protect its data.

The first part of the workshop will offer participants an opportunity to learn about County Health Rankings & Roadmaps as a data-to-action platform that is both a consumer and producer of disaggregated data. Presenters will share about challenges and key considerations around norms and values pertaining to accessing, manipulating, and displaying disaggregated data, such as how groups of individuals are categorized or making sense of the best available information even when it is data with limited reliability. Workshop participants will learn with others on how to navigate such challenges and considerations.

In the second part of the workshop, we will discuss how Decennial census data, broken down by sex, age, race, and Hispanice ethnicity for multiple geograhpic levels, is used to track a wide range of health outcomes. Changes to the Census Bureau’s disclosure avoidance system for the 2020 decennial census may hurt our ability to track health outcomes across a wide variety of sub-populations. My talk will review the new disclosure avoidance system, based on differential privacy, and highlight public health analyses using multiple demonstration datasets published by the Census Bureau.

The workshop will explore effective strategies to ensure your data represents the true diversity of your population. The discussion will include decision-making approaches, community engagement strategies, and case studies in survey science. Following the presentation, Dr. Ninez Ponce, CHPR Director, will lead activities and provide opportunities to discuss specific project needs.