Finding an Optimal Composite Factor: Weighting Data from a Household Survey Using a Cell Overlap Design

• Activity Number: 449
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 1, 2012 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Section on Survey Research Methods
• Author(s): John W Hall*+ and Barbara Lepidus Carlson and Karen CyBulski
• Companies: Mathematica Policy Research and Mathematica Policy Research and Mathematica Policy Research
• Keywords: Composite Weights ; Cell Overlap Design ; RDD ; Telephone Surveys ; Bias ; Variance

Abstract

Two approaches currently used to sample the U.S. residential population for random digit dialing (RDD) survey are the "cell only" and "cell overlap" designs. Each involves supplementing an RDD landline sample with an RDD cell sample. In either design, all households reachable by landline phone are retained in the landline sample. However, in a "cell only" design interviewers screen the cell sample for households with no landline service ( households with landline service are screened out), while in a "cell overlap design", all households accessible by cell phone are retained for the cell sample. This paper reports on weight construction for a large national telephone survey (the Health Tracking Household Survey) that used a cell overlap design. In a cell overlap design, households with both landline and cell service have a chance of being selected from either frame. To address this multiplicity issue we employed a composite weight for the dual-service group. The paper explains how the compositing factor was derived and investigates the impact of using different compositing factors on sampling error and potential bias.