Within-Household Sampling Conditioning on Household Size

Abstract

We review existing methods for sampling an adult from a household and highlight the strengths and weaknesses of these methods with respect to issues relevant for sampling in the Middle East and developing countries. We then develop a new, flexible within-household sampling scheme that takes full advantage of the fact that household size must be obtained to produce unbiased estimates. The proposed method randomly selects an adult conditional on the number of adults in the household. The method was applied in a national sample in Qatar and it proved it was effective in a country where large household sizes are common and the information required for other sampling methods is generally not known.