Child hunger in Canada

Lynn McIntyre and colleagues have analyzed data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth and reported on child hunger in Canada.¹ Unfortunately, their methodology does not permit them to extend their conclusions beyond the sample they analyzed to the population of Canada. The sample in the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth is not a random sample of Canadian children. It becomes representative of the population of Canada only when analysts take into account the sampling weights provided by Statistics Canada. It is more complicated to take into account the complex survey design and to correctly compute confidence intervals. This is generally now done by using bootstrap methodology.

McIntyre and colleagues state that they did not use Statistics Canada's sampling weights because they were not generating population estimates. Although their results might provide some information about child hunger in Canada, there is no guarantee that they are representative of the country as a whole. The article should thus have been entitled “Child hunger in a sample of Canadian families.”

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Murray M. Finkelstein
Family physician Mount Sinai Hospital Toronto, Ont.