How bad could it be? Worst-case bounds on bias in multistate models due to unobserved transitions

Christian Dudel and Daniel C. Schneider

Sociological Methods & Research, 2023, vol. 52, issue 4, 1816-1837

Abstract: Multistate models are often used in social research to analyze how individuals move between states. A typical application is the estimation of the lifetime spent in a certain state, like the lifetime spent in employment, or the lifetime spent in good health. Unfortunately, the estimation of such quantities is prone to several biases. In this paper, we study the bias due to the often implicitly used assumption that there are no unobserved transitions between states. This assumption does often not hold for the panel data typically used to estimate multistate models, as the states occupied by individuals are only known at specific points in time, and further transitions between panel waves are not recorded. We present partially identified estimates of the lifetime spent in a state, or worse-case bounds, which show the maximum possible level of bias due to unobserved transitions. We provide two examples studying the lifetime spent in disability (disabled life expectancy; DLE). The first example applies our methods to results on cohort trends in DLE in the U.S. taken from Crimmins et al. (2009). In the second example, we replicate findings from Mehta and Myrskylä (2017), and apply our methods to data from the U.S. Health and Retirement Study (HRS) in order to estimate the effects of health behaviors on DLE.

Keywords: identification bounds; multistate model; Markov model; disabled life expectancy; disability-free life expectancy; bias; worst-case bounds; Health and Retirement Study (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0049124121995540 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:somere:v:52:y:2023:i:4:p:1816-1837

DOI: 10.1177/0049124121995540

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Sociological Methods & Research
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().