The advantage and disadvantage of implicitly stratified sampling

Publication type

Journal Article

Author

Publication date

July 15, 2019

Summary:

Explicitly stratified sampling (ESS) and implicitly stratified sampling (ISS) are well-established alternative methods for controlling the distribution of a survey sample in terms of variables that define the strata. If these variables are correlated with survey estimates, the estimates will benefit from improved precision. With ESS, unbiased estimation of the standard errors of survey estimates is possible, provided that sampling strata membership is identified on the survey dataset. With ISS this is not possible and usual practice is to invoke an approximation that tends to result in systematic over-estimation of standard errors. This can be perceived as a disadvantage of ISS. However, this article demonstrates, both theoretically and through a simulation study, that true standard errors can be smaller with ISS and argues that this advantage may be more important than the ability to obtain unbiased estimates of the standard errors. The simulation findings also suggest that the extent of over-estimation with the usual approximate variance estimator may be modest.

Published in

methods, data, analyses

Volume and page numbers

Volume: 13 , p.253 -266

DOI

https://doi.org/10.12758/mda.2018.02

ISSN

21904936

Subjects

Notes

© The Author(s) 2018

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI


Related Publications

#525684

News

Latest findings, new research

Publications search

Search all research by subject and author

Podcasts

Researchers discuss their findings and what they mean for society

Projects

Background and context, methods and data, aims and outputs

Events

Conferences, seminars and workshops

Survey methodology

Specialist research, practice and study

Taking the long view

ISER's annual report

Themes

Key research themes and areas of interest