(Very) basic steps to weight a survey sample

A walkthrough guide with R code - V0.4

Josep Espasa Reig

2017-07-03

Preface

This is an introductory guide to survey weighting. It provides a step-by-step walkthrough of the main procedures and explains the statistical principles behind them. The guide includes R code to implement all stages of survey weighting and reproduces the weighting procedures of the 7th European Social Survey in the UK.

This text avoids technical notation and language and is targeted to social scientists with a basic level of statistics and probability theory. Readers without knowledge of R should be able to benefit from this text as it presents complex theoretical concepts from survey statistics in a plain language.

You can visit the GitHub repository for this site in the author’s GitHub profile.

Author

This guide was written by Josep Espasa, a Researcher at PPMI. His academic background consists of a B.A. in Political Science from Universitat Pompeu Fabra and an M.Sc. in Social Policy Analysis from K.U. Leuven. Josep is interested in survey statistics and data analysis in general.

For questions, clarifications or suggestions feel free to contact Josep at jespasareig at gmail.com.