To overcome the limited availability of individual-level socioeconomic information in the SEER database and to obtain self-reported racial/ethnic and socioeconomic data, the NCI?s Surveillance Research Program (SRP) proposes to link the individual-level SEER data with the Current Population Surveys (CPS) under the broad framework of the U.S. National Longitudinal Mortality Study (NLMS). The objective of this record linkage project is to expand the socioeconomic information that cannot be derived directly from the SEER database (thus eliminating the numerator/denominator differences), and to estimate differentials in cancer incidence, survival, and tumor characteristics, according to the preferred self-reported race/ethnicity, marital status, education, income, occupation, industry, residence, nativity/immigrant status, smoking, health status, and availability of health insurance. The CPS is a household sample survey (consisting of both telephone and personal interviews) of the civilian non-institutionalized population of the United States, which is conducted by the Bureau of the Census on behalf of the Bureau of Labor Statistics to produce monthly national statistics on unemployment and the labor force. The NLMS is a continuous long-term intergovernmental study that follows prospectively several cohorts of American men and women (totaling approximately 3.6 million) drawn from the CPS between 1973 and 2006 for their mortality experience from 1979 onwards.
