India - Survey on Morbidity and Health Care: NSS 60th Round, Schedule 25, January 2004 - June 2005

An outline of the sampling design: The sampling design adopted for the survey was essentially a stratified multi-stage one for both rural and urban areas. The first stage units (FSUs) were villages (panchayat wards for Kerala) for rural areas and NSS Urban Frame Survey (UFS) blocks for urban areas. The ultimate stage units (USUs) were households. Large FSUs were subdivided into hamlet-groups (rural)/sub-blocks (urban). Details of the formation of hamlet-groups/sub-blocks and procedure of selection of hamlet-groups/sub-blocks and then of households are also given in Appendix B.

Sampling Frame for FSUs: The list of villages (panchayat wards for Kerala) as per 1991 Census and latest lists of UFS blocks of NSSO were respectively used for selection of rural and urban sample FSUs. For selection of sample villages from the State of Jammu & Kashmir, the list of villages as per 1981 Census was used as the sampling frame. However, interior villages of Nagaland situated beyond 5 kms. of the bus route and inaccessible villages of Andaman & Nicobar Islands were left out of the survey coverage of NSS 60th round.

The procedure for selection of fsus/usus is given in detail in Appendix B of the report no.507 attached as external resources.

There was no deviation from the original sample deviation.

Sample size -- first-stage units: In all, 10,072 villages were planned to be surveyed in this round. Of these, 4,908 were allocated to the central sample -- the part surveyed mainly by the NSSO field staff -- and the rest to the State sample -- the part surveyed by the State agencies. In the urban sector, the allocations for the Central and State samples were, respectively, 2,708 and 3,096 blocks. This report is based on the estimates obtained from the central sample alone. The number of villages and that of urban blocks actually surveyed as the central sample were 4,755 and 2,668 respectively. 1.7.3 Sample size -- second-stage units: For Schedule 25.0, 10 households were planned to be surveyed in each selected FSU. In the Central sample, the actual numbers of households surveyed in the rural and urban areas were 47,302 and 26,566, respectively.
For generating any estimate, one has to extract relevant portion of the data, and aggregate after applying the weights.

Weights (or multipliers) VARIABLES are given at the end of record of each dataset. The weights (multipliers) are
WGT_SS for Sub-sample-wise estimation and WGT_Combined for combined subsample estimates.

All records of a household will have same weight figure. In case of those Blocks/Levels, where Item/Person Sl.No. is not applicable the field is filled up with 00000.

Use of subsample-wise weights (multipliers)

For generating subsample-wise estimates based on data of all subrounds taken together, either Subsample-1 households or Subsample-2 households are to be considered at one time. Subsample code is available in the dataset For generating subsample-combined estimates based on data of all subrounds taken together all households are to be considered.