Optimum Sampling Strategy for National Households in Abu Dhabi: With Implementation on the Household Master Sample

In Abu Dhabi, households are classify as “national households” where the head of household is citizen; “non-national households” family households with household head of other nationalities; and “shared households”, which are unrelated persons living independently in same housing unit.Although the national households represent 21.5% of the total number of households in Abu Dhabi, they are the most important domain for the analysis. For this reason, a special sampling strategy is required to increase the number of national households in the sample of the surveys.Based on the 2011 Abu Dhabi population census, Statistics Centre – Abu Dhabi (SCAD) constructed a household frame. A master sample of housing units was developed to support a stratified, two-stage sample design for future surveys, with stratification of enumeration areas.The enumeration areas (EAs) were stratified by the percentage of national households. In addition, a sample allocation criterion was devised to select the sample of the EAs to come up with the optimum total sample of national households in Master Sample 2012. This criterion assigned different weights to the strata based on total nationals in the sampling frame.The proposed sampling strategy produced significant improvements in the percentage of selected sample that were national households. Keywords : Sampling frame, sample allocation, stratification, Master Sample DOI : 10.7176/JESD/10-24-10 Publication date: December 31 st 2019