Matching and cleaning administrative data

This paper addresses the cleaning and linking of individual-level administrative data for the purposes of social program research and evaluation. We define administrative data as the data collected in the course of programmatic activities for the purposes of program operation, client-level tracking, service provision, or decision-making — essentially, non-research activities. Although some data sets are collected with both programmatic and research activities in mind (wage reports are a good example), researchers usually think of administrative data as a secondary data source in contrast to surveys that are conducted solely for research purposes.