Generalizing research based in a Seattle integrated health delivery system to all older adults in the region

The Adult Changes in Thought (ACT) study is a cohort of Kaiser Permanente Washington members ages 65 plus. We want to know how well decades of ACT data represent all older adults currently alive in the Seattle Metropolitan Region and how well findings transport from ACT to the regional population. This talk will focus on the transport process and the code I have posted to do this. I will demonstrate the use of participation weights that incorporate the probability someone in the Seattle Metropolitan Region would be included in ACT. As examples, we will look at analyses of the prevalence of common eye diseases and their effect on dementia incidence. Steps include 1) aligning variables available in both ACT and the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, 2) multiple imputation to create participation weights for everyone, 3) the iterative process of constructing the participation weights and assessing covariate balance, 4) analyses using these weights, and 5) bootstrapping confidence intervals to account for the error in estimating the weights.