Sampling Procedures for Assessing Accuracy of Record Linkage

The use of administrative datasets as a data source in official statistics has become much more common as there is a drive for more outputs to be produced more efficiently. Many outputs rely on linkage between two or more datasets, and this is often undertaken in a number of phases with different methods and rules. In these situations we would like to be able to assess the quality of the linkage, and this involves some re-assessment of both links and non-links. In this paper we discuss sampling approaches to obtain estimates of false negatives and false positives with reasonable control of both accuracy of estimates and cost. Approaches to stratification of links (non-links) to sample are evaluated using information from the 2011 England and Wales population census.