Analytic Tools for Evaluating Variability of Standard Errors in Large-Scale Establishment Surveys

Large-scale establishment surveys often exhibit substantial temporal or cross-sectional variability in their published standard errors. This article uses a framework defined by survey generalized variance functions to develop three sets of analytic tools for the evaluation of these patterns of variability. These tools are for (1) identification of predictor variables that explain some of the observed temporal and cross-sectional variability in published standard errors; (2) evaluation of the proportion of variability attributable to the abovementioned predictors, equation error and estimation error, respectively; and (3) comparison of equation error variances across groups defined by observable predictor variables. The primary ideas are motivated and illustrated by an application to the U.S. Current Employment Statistics program.

Evaluation of Generalized Variance Functions in the Analysis of Complex Survey Data

Two sets of diagnostics are presented to evaluate the properties of generalized variance functions (GVFs) for a given sample survey. The first set uses test statistics for the coefficients of multiple regression forms of GVF models. The second set uses smoothed estimators of the mean squared error (MSE) of GVF-based variance estimators. The smooth version of the MSE estimator can provide a useful measure of the performance of a GVF estimator, relative to the variance of a standard design-based variance estimator. Some of the proposed methods are applied to sample data from the Current Employment Statistics survey.