The 1996 CanCHEC: Canadian Census Health and Environment Cohort Profile - ARCHIVED

Since 2008, a number of population censuses have been linked to administrative health data and to financial data. These linked datasets have been instrumental in examining health inequalities and have been used in environmental health research. This paper describes the creation of the 1996 Canadian Census Health and Environment Cohort (CanCHEC)—3.57 million respondents to the census long-form questionnaire who were retrospectively followed for mortality and mobility for 16.6 years from 1996 to 2012. The 1996 CanCHEC was limited to census respondents who were aged 19 or older on Census Day (May 14, 1996), were residents of Canada, were not residents of institutions, and had filed an income tax return. These respondents were linked to death records from the Canadian Mortality Database or to the T1 Personal Master File, and to a postal code history from a variety of sources. This is the third in a set of CanCHECs that, when combined, make it possible to examine mortality trends and environmental exposures by socioeconomic characteristics over three census cycles and 21 years of census, tax, and mortality data. This report describes linkage methodologies, validation and bias assessment, and the characteristics of the 1996 CanCHEC. Representativeness of the 1996 CanCHEC relative to the adult population of Canada is also assessed.