The SHADAC Data Center not only provides state-level estimates for health care access, health care utilization, and coverage indicators for several federal surveys, but it also provides information about the margins of error (MOEs) for these estimates.
A new technical brief from SHADAC explains how to use these MOEs to calculate whether there is a statistically significant difference between two estimates from state to state, from year to year, or between demographic groups. The Data Center facilitates two approaches to this calculation:
- To do a quick, approximate assessment of whether the differences between two estimates are significant, users can visually compare the MOEs of the estimates on the SHADAC Data Center’s state rank charts.
- Users who want to get a more robust test can also use the MOEs to conduct a hypothesis test called a t-test.
Using an indicator from the National Health Interview Survey (“Had General Doctor or Provider Visit in Past Year by Age”) as an example, this brief provides step-by-step instructions for conducting a quick visual assessment for significance and for conducting the more robust t-test to see if the difference between two independent estimates is significant at the 95% confidence level.