st: Bootstrapping question

["Ilian, Henry (ACS)" <Henry.Ilian@dfa.state.ny.us>]

I am working with samples that result in very large confidence intervals, and there is no way to get larger samples. Therefore bootstrapping is an appealing option. As I understand it, when you bootstrap a model, you compute the model with all of the bootstrapped samples and report the means and other statistics for each of the model coefficients. In my case, I'm not doing a model. All I need to do is report frequencies for ordinal data. There are 120 items on a case-reading instrument, and the items have between two and four answer choices. If I used bootstrapping, would I choose selected items to bootstrap and extrapolate the confidence intervals to other items with similar proportions in the original sample? Would I report the frequencies for each item from the original sample with the bootstrapped confidence intervals, or would I substitute mean frequencies from the bootstrapped samples for all of the items and report the bootstrapped confidence intervals for each item? !
 I've been doing a fair amount of reading, but I can't seem to find the answer to these questions.

Thanks for any help anyone can offer,

Henry Ilian

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