New (Free!) Software for Assessing Survey Bias

Worried about survey bias?

We have updated our add-on (or ado) surveybias, which calculates our multinomial generalisation of the old Martin, Traugott, and Kennedy (2005) measure for survey bias. If you have any dichotomous or multinomial variable in your survey whose true distribution is known (e.g. from the census, electoral counts, or other official data), surveybias can tell you just how badly damaged your sample really is with respect to that variable. Our software makes it trivially easy to asses bias in any survey.

Within Stata, you can install/update surveybias by entering ssc install surveybias. We’ve also created a separate page with more information on how to use surveybias, including a number of worked examples.

The new version is called 1.3b (please don’t ask). New features and improvements include:

• Support for (some) complex variance estimators including Stata’s survey estimator (sample points, strata, survey weights etc.)
• Improvements to the numerical approximation. survebias is roughly seven times faster now
• A new analytical method for simple random samples that is even faster
• Convenience options for naming variables created by survebiasseries
• Lots of bug fixes and improvements to the code

If you need to quantify survey bias, give it a spin.

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