Thesis: Quality Control

(Read Sunday’s post first)

When we think of quality control, we usually think of its use in industry and manufacturing. This is an important use of quality control. But, the quality of the data that is collect in a survey is also of importance. This is what my research is about.

We are interested in knowing how well the data collectors are doing at accurately collecting the data. This information allows us to create margins of errors and indicate variability. In normal practice, a subset of the data collectors’ sampling units are identified to be reviewed. Then an expert in the topic of the survey looks at the data that has been collected and determines whether it is accurate. In many cases sampling designs are not used for the identification of the sampling units for review.

My research is to look at the sampling design that was implemented in the 2005 NRI data. My goal is to determine if this was a good design and to write the sampling design for the 2007 NRI quality control sample.