2013 NSDUH Statistical Inference Report

The focus of this report is to describe the statistical inference procedures used to produce design-based estimates as presented in the 2013 detailed tables, the 2013 mental health detailed tables, the 2013 national findings report, and the 2013 mental health findings report. Thestatistical procedures and information found in this report can also be generally applied to analyses based on the public use file as well as the restricted-use file available through the data portal. This report is organized as follows: Section 2 provides background informationconcerning the 2013 NSDUH; Section 3 discusses the prevalence rates and how they were calculated, including specifics on topics such as mental illness, major depressive episode, and serious psychological distress; Section 4 briefly discusses how missing item responses of variables that are not imputed may lead to biased estimates; Section 5 discusses sampling errors and how they were calculated; Section 6 describes the degrees of freedom that were used when comparing estimates; and Section 7 discusses how the statistical significance of differences between estimates was determined. Section 8 discusses confidence interval estimation, and Section 9 describes how past year incidence of drug use was computed. Finally, Section 10 discusses the conditions under which estimates with low precision were suppressed. Appendix A contains examples that demonstrate how to conduct various statistical procedures documented within this report using SAS® and SUDAAN® Software for Statistical Analysis of Correlated Data (RTI International, 2012) along with separate examples using Stata® software.