Using linked administrative data to aid the handling of non-response and restore sample representativeness in cohort studies: the 1958 national child development study and hospital episode statistics data

BACKGROUND: There is growing interest in whether linked administrative data have the potential to aid analyses subject to missing data in cohort studies. METHODS: Using linked 1958 National Child Development Study (NCDS; British cohort born in 1958, n = 18,558) and Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) data, we applied a LASSO variable selection approach to identify HES variables which are predictive of non-response at the age 55 sweep of NCDS. We then included these variables as auxiliary variables in multiple imputation (MI) analyses to explore the extent to which they helped restore sample representativeness of the respondents together with the imputed non-respondents in terms of early life variables (father’s social class at birth, cognitive ability at age 7) and relative to external population benchmarks (educational qualifications and marital status at age 55). RESULTS: We identified 10 HES variables that were predictive of non-response at age 55 in NCDS. For example, cohort members who had been treated for adult mental illness had more than 70% greater odds of bring non-respondents (odds ratio 1.73; 95% confidence interval 1.17, 2.51). Inclusion of these HES variables in MI analyses only helped to restore sample representativeness to a limited extent. Furthermore, there was essentially no additional gain in sample representativeness relative to analyses using only previously identified survey predictors of non-response (i.e. NCDS rather than HES variables). CONCLUSIONS: Inclusion of HES variables only aided missing data handling in NCDS to a limited extent. However, these findings may not generalise to other analyses, cohorts or linked administrative datasets. This work provides a demonstration of the use of linked administrative data for the handling of missing cohort data which we hope will act as template for others. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12874-023-02099-w.