Respondent selection within the household - A modification of the Kish grid

The problem of drawing a person from a household often occurs at the final stage of a survey design, e.g. in telephone surveys, after we contacted the households using random digit dialing. The Kish grid gives an algorithm for this random selection. We found that, contrary to the widely held opinion, the grid is not capable of providing representativeness by gender and age. This misconception stems from the fact that when the Kish grid was developed in the 1950’s, both randomness and representativeness could be achieved using the method, due to the household structure of the USA. We show that this does not hold for today’s Hungary. Finally, we suggest a modification of the Kish grid that is more appropriate for selecting a representative sample.