StatVillage: An On-Line, WWW-Accessible, Hypothetical City Based on Real Data for Use in an Introductory Class in Survey Sampling

Carl James Schwarz
Simon Fraser University

Journal of Statistics Education v.5, n.2 (1997)

Copyright (c) 1997 by Carl James Schwarz, all rights reserved. This text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editor.

StatVillage

StatVillage is a hypothetical village in Canada. Homes in StatVillage are laid out in a system of blocks on a rectangular grid with 8 homes per block. In the middle of each group of 8 homes is a playing area. Houses are addressed using a block and unit-within-block system. Services (e.g., food stores, shops) are located on the periphery of the village and are not shown on the map.

Households can be selected for a survey by using a clickable map. There are three versions of the village:

Some users have reported problems loading the larger village; the smaller villages may be useful. Refer to the hardware and software requirements.

Results from a survey are returned to your web browser and then can be saved to a file for later processing. A SAS data step is available to read the returned data records.

Many different variables are measured on each household (refer to the codebook). As in most cities, certain areas of the city are more affluent than other areas. In this village, higher income earners seem to be concentrated in the top part of the village, while lower income earners seems to be concentrated in the lower part of the village.

The data returned for each household are real data taken from public-use micro-data files from the 1991 census of Canada. A codebook is available explaining the various variables and the codes used.

Hardware and Software requirements

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