An Efficient Method for Estimating Population Parameters Using Split Questionnaire Design

The effect of survey questionnaire length on precision of survey statistics has been discussed in several studies. It is generally concluded that the lengthy questionnaire leads to increase non-sampling errors, especially nonresponse rate. Split questionnaire method has been introduced as a solution to decrease the response burden and nonresponse rate, involves splitting the questionnaire into subquestionnaires and then administering these subquestionnaires to different subsets of the original sample. In this paper, we suggest a method for splitting long questionnaire and analyzing resulting data, using small area estimation. The general idea behind this approach is to construct some socio-demographic or geographic small areas to apply small area estimation to improve the efficiency of survey statistics. Our new approach is supported by a simulation study based on a real dataset of the 2011 Iran Income and Expenditure survey, in which we show our method provides more reliable statistics than existing methods.