ADMIN: Administrative data: methods, inference and network

Policy-oriented research is increasingly making use of administrative data sets in a range
of fields including welfare-to-work, employment, health, and education. The great strength
of administrative data is that they have information on almost everyone. However, the
main weakness is that they often lack important variables; for instance, the National Pupil
Database (NPD) has detailed information on children's educational outcomes but no
information on the parent's education or employment status. In contrast, survey data
provide very rich information. Clearly, there is scope for using survey data to enhance
administrative data. An important weakness of survey data is that, unlike administrative
data, they include only a sample of individuals and suffer from problems such as nonresponse,
attrition, and recall bias. Clearly, there is scope for using administrative data to
enhance survey data.