Sampling and estimation techniques for household panels

A problem with using households as sampling units in the sample design of panels is the instability of these sampling units over time. Changes in the household composition affect the inclusion probabilities required for design-based and model-assisted inference procedures. The required information to derive correct inclusion probabilities is often not available. This problem can be circumvented by sampling persons which are followed over time. At each period the household members of these sampled persons are included in the sample. This comes down to sampling with probabilities proportional to household size where households can be selected more than once but with a maximum equal to the number of household members. In this paper properties of this sample design are described and applied to the Dutch Regional Income Survey.