Survey Methodology
Spreading response burden in business surveys at Statistics Netherlands: Evaluating sample coordination methods targeting highly burdened businesses

by Marc J.E. Smeets and Jonas Klingwort^{Note 1}

Abstract

National statistical institutes operate sample coordination systems to spread the response burden in business surveys. Despite the applied sample coordination and monitoring the response burden, some businesses might still be heavily sampled within a short period. This may lead to a peaking response burden for individual businesses, which could affect response rates and response quality. This paper proposes a new sample coordination method based on Adapted Spatially Correlated Poisson (ASCP) sampling that focuses on businesses with a high response burden. The effects on the response burden will be evaluated in two simulation studies and compared with a stratified approach, a pragmatic method in which sampling fractions are manually adjusted and with the baseline method of ignoring the response burden. For the simulations, real-world scenarios and data from Statistics Netherlands are used. The first simulation study considers a practical situation in which a given sample is adjusted with the aim to avoid the occurrence of businesses with a peaking response burden. The second simulation study analyzes the longer-term effects of the different sample coordination methods and focuses both on the reduction and spread of the response burden. The advantages and disadvantages of the different methods will be explained and discussed in detail, and recommendations for applying these methods at national statistical institutes and other survey agencies will be given.

Key Words: Adapted Spatially Correlated Poisson sampling; Pareto sampling; Poisson sampling; Response burden; Sample coordination.

Table of contents

• Section 1. Introduction
• Section 2. Sampling methods and sample coordination
• Section 3. Outline of the simulation studies
• Section 4. Results
• Section 5. Discussion and conclusion
• Acknowledgements
• References

How to cite

Smeets, M.J.E. and Klingwort, J. (2026). Spreading response burden in business surveys at Statistics Netherlands: Evaluating sample coordination methods targeting highly burdened businesses. Survey Methodology, 52(1), 151-172. Available at: http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/12-001-x/2026001/article/00007-eng.pdf.

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