Using Microsoft Access to Perform Exact Record Linkages

The author describes how using Microsoft Access to perform record linkage may be a viable alternative to specially designed record linkage software for certain applications. Access was pursued since it is fairly easy to use, flexible, interactive, and reasonably fast when performing simple queries. The major drawbacks and minor difficulties will also be discussed. Examples will be drawn from a project which involved linking court records to police records for selected Canadian cities. A description of the project to link the data from the court and police surveys will be given. The motivation for beginning the linkage and the long term goals will be discussed. The history of the project will be briefly reviewed. The author will then focus on Access, and how it is considered to be an effective alternative to methods previously used for this project. The advantages and disadvantages will be presented. The strengths of Access include: flexibility -the criteria which must be met for the records to be considered matches are fully controlled and easily altered by the user, plus it is simple to select subsets of large files which can then be easily explored; availability -Access, being part of Microsoft Office Suite, is available to many users; speed -for our application the queries took very little time to run, making the session highly interactive; ease of use -Access is easy to learn, and even fairly complicated queries can be done with only "point and click" actions with no knowledge of how to program in SQL required. The primary disadvantage is that there is no probabilistic matching based on the theory of Fellegi and Sunter (1969). This is a significant drawback; however, for many applications, exact matching is enough to meet the project's goals. Lastly, some results of linking court and police records using Access will be presented.