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Activity Number:
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293
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Type:
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Contributed
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Date/Time:
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Tuesday, July 31, 2007 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
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Sponsor:
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Section on Survey Research Methods
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| Abstract - #308591 |
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Title:
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Optimal Survey Design When Nonrespondents Are Subsampled for Follow-Up
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Author(s):
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Alistair J. O'Malley*+ and Alan M. Zaslavsky
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Companies:
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Harvard Medical School and Harvard University
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Address:
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Department of Health Care Policy, Boston, MA, 02115-5899,
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Keywords:
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Neyman allocation ; Nonrespondents ; Small Area Estimation ; Subsample ; Survey ; Telephone Followup
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Abstract:
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Healthcare surveys often first mail questionnaires to sampled members of health plans and then follow up mail nonrespondents by phone. The high unit costs of telephone interviews make it cost-effective to subsample the follow-up. We derive optimal subsampling rates for the phone subsample for comparison of health plans. Computations under design-based inference depart from the traditional formulae for Neyman allocation because the phone sample size at each plan is constrained by the number of mail nonrespondents and multiple plans are subject to a single cost constraint. Because plan means for mail respondents are highly correlated with those for phone respondents, more precise estimates (at fixed overall cost) for potential phone respondents are obtained by combining the direct estimates from phone follow-up with predictions from the mail survey using small-area estimation (SAE) models.
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