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This report is a collection of occasional papers on technical issues in the design, implementation, and operation of the 2002 round of the NSAF. It is a companion report to the 1999 methodology series Report No. 7 NSAF Collection of Papers and the 1997 methodology series Report No. 16 NSAF Technical Papers. All the papers in this collection were presented at either the annual May American Association for Public Opinion Research conference or the annual August Joint Statistical Meetings.

This report describes the weighting procedures used in the 2002 NSAF, and aims to explain the weighting in heuristic steps that will make technical matter accessible. As one of the goals of NSAF is to produce estimates of change, Round 3 estimation is compared to estimation procedures in Rounds 1 and 2. Chapter 1 of this report is written for the general reader and describes the weighting and estimation process in broad stokes, including a general overview of the survey, the goals of weighting and some specifics about how it is carried out, a discussion of how the weights are best used and details on estimates of change. Subsequent chapters address base weights and nonresponse adjustments, national adjustments to control totals, and study area adjustments to control totals.

This report describes the methods and estimated sampling errors for statistics from the 2002 survey. Sections of the report provide an overview of the sample design, summarize the precision of the survey estimates, and discuss the computation of sampling error estimates for differences estimated from NSAF data. A general review of the two main methods of computing sampling errors of estimates from surveys with complex survey designs is also presented, including a detailed discussion of the replication method of variance estimation and an overview of available software available for computing sampling errors.

This report gives the response rates achieved in the 2002 National Survey of America's Families (NSAF). In addition to giving the response rates, this report describes the methods used to compute the rates, compares the 2002 response rates with the rates from previous NSAF data collections, and examines the environment for conducting random digit dialing (RDD).

The 2002 National Survey of America's Families (NSAF) had both a telephone and an in-person protocol. This report focuses on the in-person protocol. Like both the 1997 and the 1999 surveys, the in-person component of the 2002 NSAF was designed to augment the telephone survey with a sample of households without telephones. During data collection, 650 interviews were conducted by in-person interviewers using cellular telephones to connect the respondents to telephone interviewers located in one of Westat's Maryland Telephone Research Centers (TRCs).

This report describes the sample design for the 2002 National Survey of America's Families (NSAF). This survey is the third round of the NSAF, and the objective is to estimate both the characteristics of households and persons in 2002 and changes in those characteristics since the 1997 and 1999 NSAF. While the designs for all three rounds of the NSAF are similar, several important differences exist. This report describes how the 2002 sample design relates to the designs from previous rounds. It also provides the details needed to appreciate the considerations that went into the decisions that resulted in the features of this large and complex survey.

The 2002 National Survey of America's Families (NSAF) had both a telephone and an in-person protocol. This report focuses on the telephone protocol. The telephone component of the NSAF 2002 used a list-assisted method to select the random digit dialing (RDD) sample of telephone numbers and computer-assisted interviewing (CATI) for screening and interviewing. The sample was selected separately for each study site and for the balance of the nation. Telephone households were subsampled, with the subsampling rates depending upon the presence of children in the household and responses to income screening questions. All households with children that were classified as low-income households were sampled, while higher income households with children and all households without children (but with someone under 65) were subsampled.

This report is the second in a series describing the methodology of the 1999 National Survey of America's Families (NSAF). It provides a description of the 1997 and 1999 NSAF sample design for both telephone and in-person interviews.

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