Weighting procedure of the Austrian microcensus using administrative data

Abstract

The Austrian microcensus is the biggest sample survey of the Austrian population, it is a regionally stratied cluster sample with a rotational pattern. The sampling fractions dier signicantly between the regions, therefore the sample size of the regions is quite homogeneous. The primary sampling unit is the household, within each household all persons are surveyed. The design weights are the input for the calibration on population counts and household forecasts. It is performed by iterative proportional tting. Until the third quarter of 2014 only demographic, regional and household information were used in the weighting procedure. From the fourth quarter 2014 onwards the weighting process was improved by adding an additional dimension to the calibration, namely a labour status generated from administrative data and available for the whole population. Apart from that some further minor changes were introduced. This paper describes the methodological and practical issues of the microcensus weighting process and the variance estimation applied from 2015 onwards. The new procedure was used for the rst time for the forth quarter of 2014, published at the end of March 2015. At the same time, all previous microcensus surveys back to 2004 were reweighted according to the new approach.