In the standard design approach to missing observations, the construction of weight classes and calibration are used to adjust the design weights for the respondents in the sample. Here we use these adjusted weights to define a Dirichlet distribution which can be used to make inferences about the population. Examples show that the resulting procedures have better performance properties than the...

STUDY OBJECTIVES To study the influence of the proxy respondent on health interview surveys in children. DESIGN Cross sectional study. SETTING Children under the age of 15 years drawn from the general population of Catalonia, Spain. PARTICIPANTS The Catalan Health Interview Survey consisted of a multistage probability sample representative to the population of Catalonia. The sample size w...

Recently, pollsters have experienced discrepancies between their poll predictions and subsequent election outcomes. One possible explanation of these divergencies is the growing proportion of undecided respondents in poll samples. This paper discusses three methods of reducing the proportion of undecided respondents: the use of contextual questions; a secret ballot device; and the use of a rela...

When conducting epidemiologic case-control studies, some investigators include only controls who can be interviewed within a certain time after contact and/or do not recontact potential participants who initially refuse, whereas others expend considerable effort to recruit reluctant respondents. This additional effort is only worthwhile if it results in a sample that is more representative of t...

the study examined the utilization of information and communication technologies by agricultural extension workers in niger state, nigeria. to achieve the study objective, 206 respondents were proportionately and randomly selected from the three agricultural zones in the state through multi-stage sampling technique. validated questionnaire with reliability coefficient of 0.81 was used to collec...

Tailoring colorectal cancer screening interventions to address the needs of individuals for whom screening is recommended requires accurate identification of the barriers experienced by each targeted group. The primary purpose of this survey study was to test differences in the barriers to undergoing screening colonoscopy reported by men and women. In addition, we were interested in differences...