Citation

Bow CJD, Waters NM, Faris PD, Seidel JE, Galbraith PD, Knudtson ML, Ghali WA. Int. J. Health Geogr. 2004; 3(1): 5.

Affiliation

Department of Medicine, University of Calgary, 3330 Hospital Drive NW, Calgary, AB, T2N 4N1, Canada. wghali@ucalgary.ca

Copyright

(Copyright © 2004, Holtzbrinck Springer Nature Publishing Group - BMC)

DOI

10.1186/1476-072X-3-5

PMID

15028120

PMCID

PMC394341

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Health studies sometimes rely on postal code location as a proxy for the location of residence. This study compares the postal code location to that of the street address using a database from the Alberta Provincial Project for Outcome Assessment in Coronary Heart Disease (APPROACHCopyright ). Cardiac catheterization cases in an urban Canadian City were used for calendar year 1999. We determined location in meters for both the address (using the City of Calgary Street Network File in ArcView 3.2) and postal code location (using Statistic Canada's Postal Code Conversion File). RESULTS: The distance between the two estimates of location for each case were measured and it was found that 87.9% of the postal code locations were within 200 meters of the true address location (straight line distances) and 96.5% were within 500 meters of the address location (straight line distances). CONCLUSIONS: We conclude that postal code locations are a reasonably accurate proxy for address location. However, there may be research questions for which a more accurate description of location is required.

Language: en