A class of methods for using person controls in household weighting - ARCHIVED

A class of “constrained minimum distance” methods is considered for constraining household weights to be consistent with auxiliary information on the number of persons in various age x race x sex cells. The constrained weights are as close as possible to the initial weights based on the inverse probability of selection. This class of methods includes raking and generalized least square methods, as well as multinomial maximum likelihood, (where the cells of the distribution are household types.) The properties of the methods in the presence of systematic undercoverage of the household types are studied through some simple models for coverage. Comparisons with the principal person method are made and the paper concludes with the observation that it is necessary to know more about the nature of survey undercoverage before deciding on which of the constrained minimum distance or principal person methods is to be preferred in applications.