Survey Practice This Month

The September 2008 issue of Survey Practice had an article by Mansour Fahimi and colleagues that described a bias in the commonly implemented 100-series list-assisted RDD sampling. In this issue, John Boyle and colleagues show that the bias may not be as large as described in the first article. The authors comment on each other’s papers and three experts (Michael Battaglia, Clyde Tucker, and Michael Link) also comment on the papers.

The editors’ comments – we think that a third organization should conduct a similar project, or at least the differences in the data collection procedures need to be isolated from the estimation procedures. One of the experts makes a similar suggestion because this topic is so important for telephone surveys.

This is the first issue that Survey Practice focuses on one topic. The editors have discussed other possible single topic issues such as the use of non-probability sampling in surveys. If you would like us to consider a topic for an issue of SP, please let us know.