# Recommend references on survey sample weighting

Let's aim for some at an introductory level, some articles and some textbooks. Applied is more helpful, including R code is great. Thanks!

• Can someone tag this with "weighting" or something to that effect? And I suppose it should be community-wiki. – Michael Bishop May 20 '11 at 3:55
• Not sure about a proper tag for "sampling weights", so I let other propose better alternatives, if any. – chl May 20 '11 at 9:08
• @chl Let's try [weighted-sampling] -- should be clear enough, IMO. – user88 May 20 '11 at 9:26
• I edited weighted-sampling away, asking to disambiguate into either importance-sampling or survey-sampling so that people don't use it. But they still do. – StasK Sep 19 '17 at 15:26

I guess one could start with Thomas Lumley's webpage "Survey analysis in R". He is the author of an R package called survey and he has recently published a book about "Complex Surveys: a guide to analysis using R".

• Unfortunately the book focus more on survey design and how to use the commands in the package. The book has failed to address the theories. It doesn't even tell you how you'd estimate the variance. – SmallChess Jul 2 '15 at 4:20

Lucky for me, Andrew Gelman decided to discuss this topic on his blog last week! There I found the following books recommended in the comments:

Applied Survey Data Analysis by Heeringa, West & Burglund

Sampling: Design and Analysis by Sharon Lohr

Survey Methodology by Groves, et. al.

Struggles with Survey Weighting and Regression Modeling by Andrew Gelman

Comments from lots of people and Rejoinder from Gelman

• Also from Gelman's blog: a nice set of powerpoint slides (in pdf form) by one of his collaborators, which includes a useful rule of thumb at the end of it. I'm currently using a variation on this method and it's working great for me. – David J. Harris Jun 14 '11 at 2:05
• To David J Harris: the Gelman's link now points just to Gelman's blog in general, rather than a specific pdf – zbicyclist Jul 29 '11 at 3:23

The most authoritative reference is Valliant, Dever and Kreuter (2013). Practical Tools for Designing and Weighting Survey Samples, and the accompanying PracTools package.

C.f. other answers so far in this thread, the authors are actual practitioners in the survey field, and producing/weighting survey samples is one of the central parts of at least Jill Dever's job. (Rick Valliant had just retired as of 2017, and Frauke Kreuter runs two graduate programs on two different continents at the moment; all three are highly regarded statisticians in the survey world).

My own little piece concerns some terminology in the survey weighting literature: Kolenikov (2016). Is it post-stratification or nonresponse adjustment? -- see also references therein.