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668 – Estimation with Statistical Models

Extending Hansen and Hurwitz's Approach for Nonresponse in Sample Survey

at Independent Researcher

Collecting information from sampled units over the Internet or by mail is much more cost-efficient than conducting interviews. These methods make self-enumeration an attractive data collection method for surveys and censuses. However, self-enumeration data collection can produce low response rates compared to interviews. To increase response rates, nonrespondents are subject to follow-up treatments, which influence the resulting probability of response. Because response occurrence is intrinsically conditional, we primarily record response occurrence in discrete intervals, and we characterize the probability of response by a discrete time hazard. This approach facilitates examining when a response is most likely to occur and how the probability of responding varies. Because response rates are presumed to be low, a widely used approach is to consider a second-phase of data collection, where only sub-sampled nonrespondents are followed-up. However, in practice, data collection from self-enumeration and from follow-ups are done in parallel, which makes sub-sampling from nonrespondents difficult to apply. In this case, excluding late self-enumeration responses ? not obtained from the follow-up subsample after follow-up has been started ? is recommended in the literature to avoid a nonresponse bias. Finally, we study the estimator of the finite population total that use all observed responses. Simulation results on the performance of the proposed estimators are also presented.