Violence as a phenomena has been analysed in silo due to difficulties in accessing data and concerns for the safety of those exposed. While there is some literature on violence and its associations using individual datasets, analyses using combined sources of data are very limited. Ideally data from the same individuals would enable linkage and a longitudinal understanding of experiences of violence and their (health) impacts and consequences. However, in the absence of directly linked data, look-alike modelling may provide an innovative and cost-effective approach to exploring patterns and associations in violence-related research in a multi-sectorial setting. We approached the problem of data integration as a missing data problem to create a synthetic combined dataset. We combined data from the Crime Survey of England and Wales with administrative data from Rape Crisis, focussing on victim-survivors of sexual violence in adulthood. Multiple imputation with chained equations were employed to collate/impute data from different sources. To test whether this procedure was effective, we compared regressions analyses for the individual and combined synthetic datasets on a binary, continuous and categorical variables. Our results show that the effect sizes for the combined dataset reflect those from the dataset used for imputation. The variance is higher, resulting in fewer statistically significant estimates. We extended our testing to an outcome measures and finally applied the technique to a variable fully missing in one data source. Our approach reinforces the possibility to combine administrative with survey datasets using look-alike methods to overcome existing barriers to data linkage.

The authors have declared no competing interest.

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I confirm all relevant ethical guidelines have been followed, and any necessary IRB and/or ethics committee approvals have been obtained.

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The details of the IRB/oversight body that provided approval or exemption for the research described are given below:

This research was reviewed and approved by the IMJEE (International Politics, Music, Journalism, Economics, and English) research ethics committee from City, University of London (ETH2122-2023 and ETH2122-0299).

I confirm that all necessary patient/participant consent has been obtained and the appropriate institutional forms have been archived, and that any patient/participant/sample identifiers included were not known to anyone (e.g., hospital staff, patients or participants themselves) outside the research group so cannot be used to identify individuals.

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I understand that all clinical trials and any other prospective interventional studies must be registered with an ICMJE-approved registry, such as ClinicalTrials.gov. I confirm that any such study reported in the manuscript has been registered and the trial registration ID is provided (note: if posting a prospective study registered retrospectively, please provide a statement in the trial ID field explaining why the study was not registered in advance).

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I have followed all appropriate research reporting guidelines, such as any relevant EQUATOR Network research reporting checklist(s) and other pertinent material, if applicable.

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The data are not publicly available due to restrictions agreed in the data sharing process with Rape Crisis England and Wales, due to concerns for the safety of their service users. The data that support the findings of this study can be made available on reasonable request from the corresponding author, ECB, if consented by Rape Crisis England and Wales.