Re: Unmet need groups [message #1361 is a reply to message #1355] |
Mon, 17 February 2014 18:58 |
Reduced-For(u)m
Messages: 292 Registered: March 2013
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Senior Member |
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It might be helpful if you could give some more detail - exactly what are you trying to understand using your regression analysis?
I would say that the main issue when deciding about whether to run your regression on the subsample of women who "need" v. all women is who your population of interest is. If you are just interested in whether or not married and child-bearing-age women have access/met-need, then use only them in the analysis. If your question is more like "what is the fraction of all women who have unmet need", then include everyone. But in general, based on this really short description, it sounds like you are only interested in the "at risk for unmet need" group, which would point towards using the subsample. On the other hand - unmarried women may very well be at risk, so...
One other thing to think about. The two regressions could yield the same results if you specified them so that all covariates had a different coefficient for at-risk/no-risk women respectively. By including the not-at-risk women and not allowing for different coefficients, you are essentially including a constraint that those women have the same determinants of unmet need as at-risk women. Without more information, I have no idea if that makes sense, but it is one way to think about the difference.
Happy to follow-up - unmet need isn't my main area of interest, but econometric specification is something I work a lot on.
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