Practical Tools for Designing and Weighting Survey Samples

Richard Valliant, PhD, is Research Professor Emeritus at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan and at the Joint Program in Survey Methodology at the University of Maryland. He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, an elected member of the International Statistical Institute, and has been an Associate Editor of the Journal of the American Statistical Association, Journal of Official Statistics, and Survey Methodology.   Jill A. Dever, PhD, is Senior Research Statistician at RTI International in Washington, DC. She is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, Associate Editor for Survey Methodology and the Journal of Official Statistics, and an Assistant Research Professor in the Joint Program in Survey Methodology at the University of Maryland. She has served on several panels for the National Academy of Sciences and as a task force member for the American Association of Public Opinion Research’s report on nonprobability sampling.Frauke Kreuter, PhD, is Professor and Director of the Joint Program in Survey Methodology at the University of Maryland, Professor of Statistics and Methodology at the University of Mannheim, and Head of the Statistical Methods Research Department at the Institute for Employment Research (IAB) in Nürnberg, Germany. She is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and has been Associate Editor of the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Journal of Official Statistics, Sociological Methods and Research, Survey Research Methods, Public Opinion Quarterly, American Sociological Review, and the Stata Journal. She is founder of the International Program for Survey and Data Science and co-founder of the Coleridge Initiative.

“This book attempts to explain long used approaches, illustrate how existing software can be used to solve survey problems, and develop some specialized software where needed with a focus on related practitioners (i.e. students, survey statisticians, and other survey practitioners). … this book may be useful to students, survey statisticians, social scientists and other survey practitioners. The book may also serve as a useful reference for other professionals engaged in the conduct of sample surveys.” (Sada Nand Dwivedi, ISCB News, iscb.info, Issue 67, June, 2019)

• Preface.- Acknowledgements.- 1 An Overview of Sample Design and Weighting.- 2 Project 1: Design a Single-Stage Personnel Survey.- 3 Sample Design and Sample Size for Single-Stage Surveys.- 4 Power Calculations and Sample Size Determination.- 5 Mathematical Programming.- 6 Outcome Rates and Effect on Sample Size.- 7 The Personnel Survey Design Project: One Solution.- 8 Project 2: Designing an Area Sample.- 9 Designing Multistage Samples.- 10 Area Sampling.- 11 The Area Sample Design: One Solution.- 12 Project 3: Weighting a Personnel Survey.- 13 Basic Steps in Weighting.- 14 Calibration and Other Uses of Auxiliary Data in Weighting.- 15 Variance Estimation.- 16 Weighting the Personnel Survey: One Solution.- 17 Multiphase Designs.- 18 Nonprobability Samples.- 19 Process Control and Quality Measures.- Appendix A: Notation Glossary.- Appendix B: Data Sets.- Appendix C: R Functions Used in this Book.- References.- Solutions to Selected Exercises.- Index.