Re: st: Survey question

[Steve Samuels <sjsamuels@gmail.com>]

-svy- commands?

Yes: if

• You have differential non-response in identifiable subgroups, and
want to compensate for that.
• You want to adjust for known differences between known
characteristics of the  population and the sample.  In that case you
will want to re-weight the initially equal weights with
post-stratification, or raked, weights.
• You want to separate statistics for subgroups. In this case, you
will not get correct standard errors without the survey commands.

Otherwise, no.

Steve


On Tue, May 4, 2010 at 1:37 PM, Michael Norman Mitchell
<Michael.Norman.Mitchell@gmail.com> wrote:
> Greetings
>
>  I am embarrassed to ask this question, but I just want to be extra sure
> that I am on the right track.
>
>  We have a sampling frame of people (a list of say 7000 people) and we are
> going to sample of say 300 of them. All people in the sampling frame will
> have an equal probability of being selected.
>
>  Assume that we do not want to compute "totals" (i.e, counts, frequencies)
> in the population, and just focus on things like percentages, means, and
> estimation commands (like regress). In such a case, is there any need or
> benefit to calculate -pweights- and use the -svy- commands?
>
> Many thanks,
>
> --
> Michael N. Mitchell
> See the Stata tidbit of the week at...
> http://www.MichaelNormanMitchell.com
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-- 
Steven Samuels
sjsamuels@gmail.com
18 Cantine's Island
Saugerties NY 12477
USA
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