• Survey Research
• /
• v.6 no.1
• /
• pp.39-62
• /
• 2005

In this paper we investigate some concepts frequently called in sample surveys such as 'representative of sample' as well as 'consistency', 'unbiasedness', and 'efficiency' in estimation. The first is strongly related with sampling procedure including coverage rate of survey population, response rate in establishment survey, and recruit rate of final samples. The others, however, are concerned with both sampling design and corresponding estimators simultaneously. Whereas both consistency and unbiasedness are based on the representative sample, efficiency does not depend on the representative sample. The representative of sample can be increased by raising the rate of coverage, response and recruit as well. Consistency may be investigated according to variables of interest and auxiliary variables. The well-known raing-ratio weighting method is a method to increase consistency of auxiliary variables by means of matching population size in each cell. Efficiency is not directly related with the representative of sample, and allocation methods such as proportional and Neyman allocation in stratified sampling and post-stratification are all methods to increase the efficiency of estimation under the condition of satisfying the representative of sample.