The use of unique statistical weights for estimating variances with the balanced half-sample technique

The balanced half-sample technique has been used for estimating variances in large scale sample surveys. This paper considers the bias and variability of two balanced half-sample variance estimators when unique statistical weights are assigned to the sample individuals. Two weighting schemes are considered. In the first, the statistical weights based on the entire sample are used for each of the individual half-samples while in the second, the weights are adjusted for each individual half-sample.Sampling experiments using computer generated data from populations with specified values for the strata parameters were performed. Their results indicate that the variance estimators based on the second method are subject to much less bias and variability than those based on the first.