ArticleDemography2015
Can we spin straw into gold? An evaluation of immigrant legal status imputation approaches.
Article in Demography, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 29 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
29 citing papers in PubMed.
- Medicaid expansion for undocumented adults and its association with health insurance coverage among noncitizens in California, 2017-2023.Health affairs scholar · 2026Article
- Migration Status Gradients in Immigrant Poverty: A Comparison of Imputation Methods.Sociological methods & research · 2025Article
- Deportation threat predicts Latino US citizens and noncitizens' psychological distress, 2011 to 2018.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Immigrant Legal Status among Essential Frontline Workers in the United States during the COVID-19 Pandemic Era.The International migration review · 2023Article
- Immigration and the Life Course: Contextualizing and Understanding Healthcare Access and Health of Older Adult Immigrants.Journal of aging and health · 2022Article
- Assessment of Immigrants' Premium and Tax Payments for Health Care and the Costs of Their Care.JAMA network open · 2022Article
- Geographic variation in COVID-19 vulnerability by legal immigration status in California: a prepandemic cross-sectional study.BMJ open · 2022Article
- (Il)legality and psychosocial well-being: Central Asian migrant women in Russia.Journal of ethnic and migration studies · 2022Article
- Using machine learning to impute legal status of immigrants in the National Health Interview Survey.MethodsX · 2022Article
- Standing on Their Own Two Feet: How the New Public Charge Rules Could Impact Non-European LPR Applicants.Population research and policy review · 2022Article
- Article
- Immigrant Status, Citizenship, and Victimization Risk in the United States: New Findings from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS).Criminology : an interdisciplinary journal · 2021Article
- Article
- Aging and undocumented: The sociology of aging meets immigration status.Sociology compass · 2021Article
- The Association Between Legal Status and Poverty Among Immigrants: A Methodological Caution.Demography · 2020Article
- Disentangling contributions of demographic, family, and socioeconomic factors on associations of immigration status and health in the United States.Journal of epidemiology and community health · 2020Article
- Signs of the End of the Paradox? Cohort Shifts in Smoking and Obesity and the Hispanic Life Expectancy Advantage.Sociological science · 2020Article
- Policies of Exclusion: Implications for the Health of Immigrants and Their Children.Annual review of public health · 2019Review
- The Effects of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals on the Educational Outcomes of Undocumented Students.Demography · 2018Article
- Household Immigration Status Had Differential Impact On Medicaid Enrollment In Expansion And Nonexpansion States.Health affairs (Project Hope) · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Researchers have developed logical, demographic, and statistical strategies for imputing immigrants' legal status, but these methods have never been empirically assessed. We used Monte Carlo simulations to test whether, and under what conditions, legal status imputation approaches yield unbiased estimates of the association of unauthorized status with health insurance coverage. We tested five methods under a range of missing data scenarios. Logical and demographic imputation methods yielded biased estimates across all missing data scenarios. Statistical imputation approaches yielded unbiased estimates only when unauthorized status was jointly observed with insurance coverage; when this condition was not met, these methods overestimated insurance coverage for unauthorized relative to legal immigrants. We next showed how bias can be reduced by incorporating prior information about unauthorized immigrants. Finally, we demonstrated the utility of the best-performing statistical method for increasing power. We used it to produce state/regional estimates of insurance coverage among unauthorized immigrants in the Current Population Survey, a data source that contains no direct measures of immigrants' legal status. We conclude that commonly employed legal status imputation approaches are likely to produce biased estimates, but data and statistical methods exist that could substantially reduce these biases.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.