ABSTRACT
With recent growth in the use of survey methods to obtain data for social science research and the many large-scale survey datasets available to secondary researchers, a vast array of research questions can be addressed. It is important, however, to understand the complexities of analyzing data from these complex sample datasets. There are two essential chapters in this text that a reader may want to consult prior to reading this chapter: Chapter 6 by Lohr on Coverage and Sampling and Chapter 17 by Biemer and Christ on Weighting Survey Data. This chapter on analyzing data from complex sample data sets builds on the information provided in those two chapters. The goals of this chapter are to introduce the reader to the problems associated with using traditional statistical procedures with data from complex samples, provide simple strategies to more appropriately estimate statistics and their sampling variances under some common sampling designs, and provide additional resources that can be accessed for further reading.
