The effect of nonresponse adjustments on variance estimation

Many surveys employ weight adjustment procedures to reduce nonresponse bias. These adjustments make use of available auxiliary data. This paper addresses the issue of jackknife variance estimation for estimators that have been adjusted for nonresponse. Using the reverse approach for variance estimation proposed by Fay (1991) and Shao and Steel (1999), we study the effect of not re-calculating the nonresponse weight adjustment within each jackknife replicate. We show that the resulting 'shortcut' jackknife variance estimator tends to overestimate the true variance of point estimators in the case of several weight adjustment procedures used in practice. These theoretical results are confirmed through a simulation study where we compare the shortcut jackknife variance estimator with the full jackknife variance estimator obtained by re-calculating the nonresponse weight adjustment within each jackknife replicate.