Constructing a Lifetime Nursing Home Use Data Base from a Sample of Discharges

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

This paper describes the methodology used in selecting and reweighting discharge level data from the 1985 National Nursing Home Survey so that it represents a sample of decedents who used nursing homes sometime during their lives. Such a strategy allows for the analysis of lifetime nursing home use and financing with a level of information that previously was not available. Adjustments to the existing weight included those for unit nonresponse, multiple probabilities of selection, and differential follow-up periods, as well as a ratio adjustment to bring the distribution of nursing home users with and without use in the last year of life in line with an external distribution from the 1986 National Mortality Followback Survey. A comparison of weighted estimates is made between the reweighted Nursing Home Survey data and the Mortality Followback data.