Geographic-based oversampling in demographic surveys of the United States - ARCHIVED

Often one of the key objectives of multi-purpose demographic surveys in the U.S. is to produce estimates for small domains of the population such as race, ethnicity, and income. Geographic-based oversampling is one of the techniques often considered for improving the reliability of the small domain statistics using block or block group information from the Bureau of the Census to identify areas where the small domains are concentrated. This paper reviews the issues involved in oversampling geographical areas in conjunction with household screening to improve the precision of small domain estimates. The results from an empirical evaluation of the variance reduction from geographic-based oversampling are given along with an assessment of the robustness of the sampling efficiency over time as information for stratification becomes out of date. The simultaneous oversampling of several small domains is also discussed.