Results of Calibration Research for the 2015 American Housing Survey

• Activity Number: 137
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Monday, August 10, 2015 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Survey Research Methods Section
• Author(s): Brian Shaffer* and Stephen Ash and Ernest Lawley
• Companies: and U.S. Census Bureau and U.S. Census Bureau
• Keywords: Calibration ; Raking ; Weighting

Abstract

In 2015, the American Housing Survey is selecting a new sample cohort of housing units. The prior cohort was selected in 1985 and was interviewed every other year until 2013. With this new sample comes the opportunity to reexamine and revise the weighting methodology. The 2013 methodology included two sets of ratio adjustments that were combined in a raking procedure: one for known totals of housing units and another for population distributions. The adjustment for population distributions used the concept of the principal person to define the distributions. In our paper, we discuss the results of our research into two main questions. First, can we improve the principal person methodology of the current ratio adjustments and replace it with a calibration weighting adjustment to population totals? Second, can we combine population and housing unit ratio adjustments into one calibration adjustment? Here we examine whether one calibration adjustment can be employed to adjust for housing unit characteristics that include both housing unit and population characteristics.