Question
A faculty member is looking to teach the use of bootstrap weights with the Canadian Community Health Survey 2013-2014 file, and is having a not-so-minor difficulty: the bootstrap weights aren’t present on the file.
Were they created, and can they be released?
Answer
The CCHS team has confirmed that the CCHS 2013-2014 PUMF does not contain bootstrap weights. The masterfile does contain bootstrap weights.
Answer (2)
“Here is the response from methodology:
‘The standard type of bootstrap weights used for household surveys are the Rao-Wu-Yue bootstrap weights. These are what are on the master file. The issue is that when we do the “resampling” required in producing bootstrap weights it has to be done within a group of units. With how the CCHS is designed this group has to be a geographic grouping for much of the sample. As a result, the bootstrap weights have some imbedded geographical information within them. For that reason, Statistics Canada does not allow these type of bootstrap weights on the PUMFs. It is not a CCHS issue, this is policy to maintain confidentiality of respondents on publicly available data. Research has been conducted into using a different type of bootstrap weight as new methodologies are being created. And it may be that in the future that will be available to users.’
The CCHS team had a good suggestion. We could give the faculty member access to the dummy file, which is a full set of microdata and documentation with bootstrap weights. It isn’t real survey data, but would be very useful for teaching a class on how to use bootstrap weights.”
