[R] Estimating the standard error when you have sampling weights.

[Thomas Lumley]

On Mon, 24 Nov 2008, Robert Wilkins wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Where can I find information ( freely available on the Internet , and also
> books or other sources ) on how having sampling weights changes the
> calculation of the standard error (of means and proportions)?
>

Alan Zaslavsky keeps a comprehensive list of software for complex surveys, 
at
http://www.hcp.med.harvard.edu/statistics/survey-soft/

Although I'm biased, I think the 'survey' package in R is better than 
either SPSS or SAS for this purpose. The main competition would be Stata 
and the specialised packages such as SUDAAN and WesVar.

If you just want means and proportions, though, any of the software would 
be perfectly adequate.

The PEAS project at Napier University has some nice introductory material, 
although some of their software comparisons are a bit out of date:
http://www.napier.ac.uk/depts/fhls/peas/

 	-thomas

Thomas Lumley			Assoc. Professor, Biostatistics
tlumley at u.washington.edu	University of Washington, Seattle