For a sanitation project in Bangladesh I need to design a three stage sample survey to be representative of around 40 million people. I find myself suddenly with several challenges with which I struggle and would be gratefully for any help. As the questions are linked I kept them together rather than creating multiple posts
1) SURVEY DESIGN So far I designed mainly two stage cluster surveys but never did a three stage cluster survey design. It seems that in the analysis only the PSU is taken into account and enumeration area. So whatever happens at the second stage seems irrelevant to the analysis which seem odd to me. Our intention was to do a PPM at the first and the second stage and have same size takes in each enumeration area. The design would be to select 50 out of 150 Upazila's (sub-districts) as PSU using probability proportionate to size. The second stage would be 6 village-groups out of an average of 250 village-groups per Upazila using PPS use SRS to select 26 households in each of the 6 selected villages per Upazila. Total sample size 7800 Household is the BSU and where we need to calculate information on the individual level we are confident to be able to correct the sample weights for that. In the two stage sampling I managed to optimise in other projects I could base the sample design based on cost to optimise it but it seems more difficult with three stage sampling. 2) CATEGORICAL VARIABLES So far I worked mainly with binary data but now we are collecting ranked categorical variables and I'm not sure how to treat these. The categorical variable form a scale to adherence to a certain level of sanitation but the scale is not linear. 3) Using "R" instead of STATA While always wanted learn "R" I always found it hard to get my hear around it. Even with Rstudio and Rcommander installed. I installed the "survey" package and tried to read up on how to use it but fail to. Is their anybody willing to help? While I can get my head around basic probability principle in survey sampling I'm not a statistician so I'll bite my pride and ask to explain it as I would be a 10 year old just to be be sure I get it. Any good reference material is always welcome but more direct answers who help me the most due to time constraints as we have to finish the design in the days to come. Thanks a lot in advance for all your help Kristof -- View this message in context: http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/Three-Stage-Sampling-of-categorical-variable-using-survey-in-R-tp4644110.html Sent from the R help mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.