Sampling with Field Burden Constraints
An Application to Sheltered Homeless and Low-Income Housed Women
Published in: Field Methods, v. 18, no. 1, Feb. 2006, p. 43-58
Posted on RAND.org on January 01, 2006
In this article, the authors present a statistically efficient, cost-effective way of collecting a probability sample in the presence of certain field burden constraints: restrictions on the maximum number of participants that can be sampled within a given institution and a small population size relative to the sample size dictated by the study aims. The authors suggest the use of disproportionate stratified random sampling as an alternative to two-stage sampling under these circumstances and illustrate how to account, via weighting, for the participants' differential probabilities of inclusion. They describe their approach with respect to a study of impoverished women, for which this sampling scheme was quite effective.
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