Protecting Survey Design Information in Public Use Files by Constructing Combined Strata Accounting for the Realized Sample Selection

• Activity Number: 288
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 5, 2014 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Survey Research Methods Section
• Author(s): Vladislav Beresovsky*+
• Companies: NCHS
• Keywords: confidentiality ; survey design ; degrees of freedom ; PSU ; PPS sampling

Abstract

The design of most surveys contains information revealing geographic locality of the sampled items. Combined with the other sources, this information contains the risk of violating the confidentiality of survey data. We propose modification of existing methods for masking design information by constructing combined strata variance estimators. In our approach variance estimation error is minimized conditional on the realized PSU selection, which is usually suboptimal to the declared selecting PSUs with probability proportional to their size (PPS). We compare errors of variances estimated with new method versus conventional methods of combining strata proposed in literature.