Evaluating within household selection rules under a multi-stage design - ARCHIVED

The 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) and the international Adult Literacy and Lifeskills (ALL) surveys each involved stratified multi-stage area sample designs. During the last stage, a household roster was constructed, the eligibility status of each individual was determined, and the selection procedure was invoked to randomly select one or two eligible persons within the household. The objective of this paper is to evaluate the within-household selection rules under a multi-stage design while improving the procedure in future literacy surveys. The analysis is based on the current US household size distribution and intracluster correlation coefficients using the adult literacy data. In our evaluation, several feasible household selection rules are studied, considering effects from clustering, differential sampling rates, cost per interview, and household burden. In doing so, an evaluation of within-household sampling under a two-stage design is extended to a four-stage design and some generalizations are made to multi-stage samples with different cost ratios.