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Health care insurance companies often conduct sample surveys of health plan members. Survey purposes include: consumer satisfaction with the plan and members’ health status, functional status, health literacy and/or health services utilization outside of the plan. Vendors or contractors typically conduct these surveys for insurers. Survey results may be used for plans’ accreditation, evaluation, quality improvement and/or marketing. This article describes typical sampling plans and data analysis strategies used in these surveys, showing how these methods may result in biased estimators of population parameters (e.g. percentage of plan members who are satisfied). Practical suggestions are given to improve these surveys: alternate sampling plans, increasing the response rate, component calculation for the survey response rate, weighted analyses, and adjustments for unit non-response. Since policy, regulation, accreditation, management and marketing decisions are based, in part, on results from these member surveys, these important and numerous surveys need to be of higher quality.

Purpose — This chapter provides an overview of the sampling outcomes of the field surveys. This includes a description of the samples from the VISTA Follow-On survey and the Special survey covering both Metropolitan Melbourne and the Latrobe Regional Samples. Analysis includes an assessment of the coverage of the samples plus a discussion of the rationale and outcomes for improved sample coverage from the Special survey.

Methodology — The methodology adopted concerns the quantitative statistical analysis of survey sample coverage and cross tabulation of these findings from statistics on the population being sampled.

Findings — The Vista Follow-On survey approach was an effective means of targeting households for survey and also reduced the number of questions required. However, the resulting sample had low coverage of extremely disadvantaged groups. An adjustment to the survey quotas and a new recruitment method termed the Special survey were implemented to address this issue. This proved effective in obtaining a more balanced sample.

Information and communications technology (ICT) offers enormous opportunities for individuals, businesses and society. The application of ICT is equally important to economic and non-economic activities. Researchers have increasingly focused on the adoption and use of ICT by small and medium enterprises (SMEs) as the economic development of a country is largely dependent on them. Following the success of ICT utilisation in SMEs in developed countries, many developing countries are looking to utilise the potential of the technology to develop SMEs. Past studies have shown that the contribution of ICT to the performance of SMEs is not clear and certain. Thus, it is crucial to determine the effectiveness of ICT in generating firm performance since this has implications for SMEs’ expenditure on the technology. This research examines the diffusion of ICT among SMEs with respect to the typical stages from innovation adoption to post-adoption, by analysing the actual usage of ICT and value creation. The mediating effects of integration and utilisation on SME performance are also studied. Grounded in the innovation diffusion literature, institutional theory and resource-based theory, this study has developed a comprehensive integrated research model focused on the research objectives. Following a positivist research paradigm, this study employs a mixed-method research approach. A preliminary conceptual framework is developed through an extensive literature review and is refined by results from an in-depth field study. During the field study, a total of 11 SME owners or decision-makers were interviewed. The recorded interviews were transcribed and analysed using NVivo 10 to refine the model to develop the research hypotheses. The final research model is composed of 30 first-order and five higher-order constructs which involve both reflective and formative measures. Partial least squares-based structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) is employed to test the theoretical model with a cross-sectional data set of 282 SMEs in Bangladesh. Survey data were collected using a structured questionnaire issued to SMEs selected by applying a stratified random sampling technique. The structural equation modelling utilises a two-step procedure of data analysis. Prior to estimating the structural model, the measurement model is examined for construct validity of the study variables (i.e. convergent and discriminant validity).

The estimates show cognitive evaluation as an important antecedent for expectation which is shaped primarily by the entrepreneurs’ beliefs (perception) and also influenced by the owners’ innovativeness and culture. Culture further influences expectation. The study finds that facilitating condition, environmental pressure and country readiness are important antecedents of expectation and ICT use. The results also reveal that integration and the degree of ICT utilisation significantly affect SMEs’ performance. Surprisingly, the findings do not reveal any significant impact of ICT usage on performance which apparently suggests the possibility of the ICT productivity paradox. However, the analysis finally proves the non-existence of the paradox by demonstrating the mediating role of ICT integration and degree of utilisation explain the influence of information technology (IT) usage on firm performance which is consistent with the resource-based theory. The results suggest that the use of ICT can enhance SMEs’ performance if the technology is integrated and properly utilised. SME owners or managers, interested stakeholders and policy makers may follow the study’s outcomes and focus on ICT integration and degree of utilisation with a view to attaining superior organisational performance.

This study urges concerned business enterprises and government to look at the environmental and cultural factors with a view to achieving ICT usage success in terms of enhanced firm performance. In particular, improving organisational practices and procedures by eliminating the traditional power distance inside organisations and implementing necessary rules and regulations are important actions for managing environmental and cultural uncertainties. The application of a Bengali user interface may help to ensure the productivity of ICT use by SMEs in Bangladesh. Establishing a favourable national technology infrastructure and legal environment may contribute positively to improving the overall situation. This study also suggests some changes and modifications in the country’s existing policies and strategies. The government and policy makers should undertake mass promotional programs to disseminate information about the various uses of computers and their contribution in developing better organisational performance. Organising specialised training programs for SME capacity building may succeed in attaining the motivation for SMEs to use ICT. Ensuring easy access to the technology by providing loans, grants and subsidies is important. Various stakeholders, partners and related organisations should come forward to support government policies and priorities in order to ensure the productive use of ICT among SMEs which finally will help to foster Bangladesh’s economic development.

Sampling units for the 2013 Methods-of-Payment survey were selected through an approximate stratified two-stage sampling design. To compensate for nonresponse and noncoverage and ensure consistency with external population counts, the observations are weighted through a raking procedure. We apply bootstrap resampling methods to estimate the variance, allowing for randomness from both the sampling design and raking procedure. We find that the variance is smaller when estimated through the bootstrap resampling method than through the naive linearization method, where the latter does not take into account the correlation between the variables used for weighting and the outcome variable of interest.

Applied econometric analysis is often performed using data collected from large-scale surveys. These surveys use complex sampling plans in order to reduce costs and increase the estimation efficiency for subgroups of the population. These sampling plans result in unequal inclusion probabilities across units in the population. The purpose of this paper is to derive the asymptotic properties of a design-based nonparametric regression estimator under a combined inference framework. The nonparametric regression estimator considered is the local constant estimator. This work contributes to the literature in two ways. First, it derives the asymptotic properties for the multivariate mixed-data case, including the asymptotic normality of the estimator. Second, I use least squares cross-validation for selecting the bandwidths for both continuous and discrete variables. I run Monte Carlo simulations designed to assess the finite-sample performance of the design-based local constant estimator versus the traditional local constant estimator for three sampling methods, namely, simple random sampling, exogenous stratification and endogenous stratification. Simulation results show that the estimator is consistent and that efficiency gains can be achieved by weighting observations by the inverse of their inclusion probabilities if the sampling is endogenous.