A Naive Multiple Imputation Method for Ignorable Nonresponse

A common method of handling nonresponse in sample survey is to delete the cases, which may result in a substantial loss of cases. Thus in certain situation, it is of interest to create a complete set of sample values. In this case, a popular approach is to impute the missing values in the sample by the mean or the median of responders. The difficulty with this method which just replaces each missing value with a single imputed value is that inferences based on the completed dataset underestimate the precision of the inferential procedure. Various suggestions have been made to overcome the difficulty but they might not be appropriate for public-use files where the user has only limited information for about the reasons for nonresponse. In this note, a multiple imputation method is considered to create complete dataset which might be used for all possible inferential procedures without misleading or underestimating the precision.