analytical study of population structure by sampling in rural areas

despite the care taken to ensure the quality of date collected by enumeration and sampling, the final tabulation will sometimes give obvious indication of errors in basic information. evaluation of these errors furnishes those who use such a study and sampling. more general, the finding in these studies should be helpful to others that conduct surveys. in order to compare the age composition of the rural areas between two provinces of iran, i.e. azarbaijan, and isfahan, a sample of each has selected (8 and 23 counties respectively).the main idea was to evaluate the errors in age recording and the effect of digit preference on the age composition of the population. it became evident that, azarbaijan has a smaller family size, lower median age, higher sex ratio and lower dependency ratio than isfahan. more over, the age pyramid of isfahan has a better shape and more regular than azarbaijan and therefore the myer’s index which determines the degree of dispersion in age reporting is lower in isfahan which may be the result of higher literacy in isfahan. generally men in both samples report their age more precisely than women.