How To…

  • We provide a primer on the basics of Geocoding, including descriptions of the many options and services available, and the nitty-gritty details of address cleaning, address formatting, and evaluation of geocoding accuracy.
  • In Generating ABSMs we describe the concepts, methods, and measures behind creating area-based socioeconomic measures, including a summary table of the 19 theoretically justified area-based socioeconomic measures we created based on 1990 U.S. Census data (see our ABSM Creation Table).
  • Under Analytic Methods, we provide details on how to merge geocoded surveillance data with Census derived population denominators and area-based socioeconomic measures. We also present basic epidemiologic methods for generating descriptive statistics, including directly age-standardized incidence rates, incidence rate ratios and rate differences, the relative index of inequality, and population attributable fraction. Examples are provided for each of these techniques, and each section is further linked to a comprehensive Case Example.
  • We’ve also included some information about Multi-level Modeling and Visual Display of data for surveillance reporting.