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Evaluating frame coverage for an establishment survey

Keywords: Frame coverage, address lists, business registers, Synar

All States have been required for over 15 years to perform annual inspections of tobacco retail outlets to assess the rate of illegal sales of tobacco products to minors. Furthermore, the federal regulation (Synar amendment) requires that these inspections be carried out on a random sample of outlets. A few States use area frames but the vast majority rely on list frames, commercial, government, or both. A review of the process resulted in a requirement that States that use list frames implement coverage studies to measure the completeness of these frames. As a result of this requirement, we have accumulated a rich data set involving design details and results for these coverage studies. In this presentation we describe the methodology used by the States as well as the results and we identify those States in which the coverage study designs have been most efficient in confirming complete coverage. We conclude with a series of recommendations for how to undertake such evaluation surveys.