| Re: Country-level weights for MLM [message #4309 is a reply to message #4308] |
Tue, 05 May 2015 20:14   |
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user-rhs
Messages: 132
Registered: December 2013
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Senior Member |
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A Conklin,
You should ask yourself why it is we weight data during analysis, which is to account for probability of selection into the sample. There are more than 27 low/middle income countries in the world, so what you are proposing (assign weight of 1/27) won't "correct for selection," as you are giving equal weight to each country. That is, you will get the same estimates weighted as unweighted. If you assume the countries were selected at random regardless of population, you don't need a "country weight." De-normalising the weights should account for the differential base populations represented in each country at each survey weight (the "individual"-level weights).
I'm not sure how countries were "selected" for DHS. I imagine it was initially purposive at the start back when DHS was the World Fertility Survey, rather than random, but I am no DHS historian. Note that one danger of assigning incorrect weights without knowing the underlying "sampling design" is that you may introduce even more bias into your estimates. Anyway, I think the pweight is the more important weight here to get right.
RHS
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