Age-Eligibility Oversampling to Reduce Screening Costs in a Multimode Survey

Oregon Convention Center 

Some surveys have a narrow range of eligibility, including age subgroups and special populations such as smokers. It is expensive and inefficient to sample households that do not have any eligible people. The National Survey of Family Growth has a target population of Americans aged 15 through 49 thus we would like to minimize sampling households with people aged 50 and older. In this paper, we discuss a method to oversample households within sampling units that are more likely to be age-eligible.

RTI has an enhanced address frame which includes addresses as well as data from marketing vendors. Using the enhanced frame and historic survey data from a prior, unrelated study, we developed a model to predict whether households have people of the targeted age range. We will discuss the method to build the model, score the model on the sampling frame, and create age-eligibility strata to allocate more of the sample to households with higher likelihood of eligibility. We use data from 2022 to show how the model performed and how we will change the allocation in future years of data collection.