Hi,

I’m doing an analysis of applications and selections for grants. I do not have a way to identify the unique person in the data (and a person can apply for multiple grants), so any analysis has to be done at the level of the application. I show an example table (made up data). It shows for each year, of all applications, what percentage came from minorities, what percentage came from whites, and what % form race unknown. (note I have an equivalent table of % selections that I would also want to do the equivalent)
% applications
% Minority % White % Race Unknown Total
2011 56% 23% 21% 100%
2012 55% 24% 21% 100%
2013 45% 25% 30% 100%
2014 35% 23% 42% 100%
2015 34% 27% 39% 100%
2016 40% 29% 31% 100%
2017 32% 32% 36% 100%

I was asked to provide some kind of “margins of error” around the estimates.

I thought about adding confidence intervals around each proportion, which seems to be easily obtained in Stata using proportion gender, over(year) (shows the proportion, std. Err, and logit 95% conf. Interval)

My question is -
    • Is it a good idea to show the confidence intervals around every one of these proportions? What am I getting from this? For example, can I use it to say the % of whites was “statistically significantly higher” in 2017 than in 2011 if the confidence intervals do not overlap?
    • In reading about confidence intervals, the examples I’ve found are based on surveys. Here, I have a population, as it is everyone who applied for the grant. Thus, are these confidence intervals appropriate?
    • Is it a major problem to do be showing confidence intervals on the level of the application and not the unique person?

Note: I am using Stata 15

Any advice would be helpful!

MJ