Question

Does anyone know how to use BRR weights in Lumley’s survey package for estimating variance if your dataset already has BRR weights it in?

I am working with PISA data, and they already include 80 BRR replicates in their dataset. How can I get as.svrepdesign to use these, instead of trying to create its own? I tried the following and got the subsequent error:

dstrat <- svydesign(id=~uniqueID,strata=~strataVar, weights=~studentWeight, 
                data=data, nest=TRUE)
dstrat <- as.svrepdesign(dstrat, type="BRR")

Error in brrweights(design$strata[, 1], design$cluster[, 1], ..., 
    fay.rho = fay.rho,  : Can't split with odd numbers of PSUs in a stratum

Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks.

Answer 1

no need to use as.svrepdesign() if you have a data frame with the replicate weights already 🙂 you can create the replicate weighted design directly from your data frame.

say you have data with a main weight column called mainwgt and 80 replicate weight columns called repwgt1 through repwgt80 you could use this —

yoursurvey <-
    svrepdesign( 
    weights = ~mainwgt , 
    repweights = "repwgt[0-9]+" , 
    type = "BRR", 
    data = yourdata ,
    combined.weights = TRUE
)

— this way, you don’t have to identify the exact column numbers. then you can run normal survey commands like —

svymean( ~variable , design = yoursurvey )

if you’d like another example, here’s some example code and an explanatory blog post using the current population survey.