Questionnaire Dwelling Unit-Level and Person Pair-Level Sampling ...

should be believed. This decision depended upon the "quality of the roster," where the household
size was determined by the pair member with a better "roster quality." One obvious way to
measure roster quality was by noting the number of cases where the ages, relationship codes, or
genders were missing in the roster. Clearly, if a roster was missing one or more of these three
variables for some of the roster members, the roster was of "poorer quality" than a roster with
these variables nonmissing for all roster members.
If only one household member was selected as a respondent, known colloquially as a
"nonpair household," the rules for creating HHSIZE were the same as those that were used if two
household members were selected in a pair, but only one of the pair members had a nonmissing,
acceptable value for a reported household size, with one important exception. If only one
household member was selected as a respondent, it was obviously permissible to have a reported
household size of 1, whereas in a selected pair a reported household size of 1 was considered
"bad data," necessitating the use of the screener household size as the source variable for
HHSIZE.
In summary, the variables used to determine HHSIZE included, for each pair member,
the reported and edited household sizes, the number of cases with valid ages in the roster, the
number of cases with valid ages with the count in some age categories replaced by the minimum
possible in that age category, and a quality of roster count of the number of roster members with
missing information. The screener household size, which was the same for each pair member,
also was used. Using all of these tools, HHSIZE did not have any missing values in the 2006
survey, nor did it have any in surveys from previous years. General points about the creation of
the household size variable are provided in Appendix P.
6.2.3.2 Household Composition Age Count Variables
It would seem logical to assert that the ages of other household members would be good
predictors for the domain to which a pair might belong. Such variables also would be important
for imputing multiplicity and household-level domain counts. The household-consistent age
counts were limited to the following age ranges: younger than 12, 12 to 14, 15 to 17, 12 to 17, 12
to 20, 18 to 25, 26 to 34, 35 to 49, and 50 or older. These variables were called AGE011,
AGE1214, AGE1517, AGE1217, AGE1220, AGE1825, AGE2634, AGE3549, and AGE50P,
respectively.
The first step in this process was to count the nonmissing ages for roster members in the
household for each pair member. In some cases, it was necessary to adjust the count since the
ages could not be matched exactly. For example, suppose a 38-year-old and a 17-year-old were
interviewed and the 17-year-old was interviewed first. Suppose also that the 17-year-old turned
18 (i.e., had his 18 th birthday) before the 38-year-old was interviewed. Hence, the 17-year-old
would have had an age of 18 in the 38-year-old's roster. Because the ages for the pair domains
were defined at the time of each pair member's interview, the ages of interest for pair domains
would have been 17 and 38. Hence, it was necessary to account for this by creating a new roster
age variable that matched the age provided in the other pair member's questionnaire. The age
counts using this new roster age variable were equivalent to subtracting 1 from the previously
obtained 18- to-25 count and adding 1 to the previously obtained 12-to-17 count in the 38-yearold's
roster. These adjustments were made for all cases where a match was made between one
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