On Sat, 27 Oct 2007, eugen pircalabelu wrote: > > As mentioned in the subject, my question regards more the methodological > part that accompanies survey design and the statistical part that is > involved. So, I have the following data:
You might get more helpful (or more authoritative) advice on methodological issues in survey sampling on other lists, in particular from srmsnet, rather than posting the same question twice to r-help. > > Now, is there a possibility of designing some weights for each household > based on the characteristics of individuals which form the hh? Say, I > want to calibrate each hh for its occupational category but i don't have > the additional data for household, rather it is available for > individuals, ex: I don't know that 32% of households are included in the > category of studenthh (inclusion which is based on the status of the > head of hh), but i know that 32% of all the individuals from which the > sample of hhs is drawn are all students. Yes and no. You can't calibrate to population totals you don't know. You can create household-level weights that calibrate the individual-level data to individual-level population totals. And the survey() package knows how to do this: it is the aggregate.stage= or aggregate.index= argument to calibrate(), depending on whether you are using replicate weights or design information for your standard errors. I don't know if this technique is useful in your setting. My impression is that it is mainly used by national statistics agencies that want to avoid weird-looking inconsistencies (eg 2,000,000 marriages involving 1,100,000 men and 900,000 women [1]). It is presumably less efficient than using individual-level weights. A description from Statistics Belgium is linked from ?calibrate. -thomas [1] Apart from in civilised places like, eg, Canada or MA. Thomas Lumley Assoc. Professor, Biostatistics [EMAIL PROTECTED] University of Washington, Seattle ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.