SAE Manual Sections 1 to 4_1 (May 06).pdf - National Statistical ...

A Guide to Small Area Estimation - Version 1.1 05/05/2006
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This guide aims to give advice for National Statistical Centres and regional offices on
how to advise, respond to and incorporate small area estimates into their work, so
they can apply simple models themselves and know when to draw on
methodological skills for more complex models.
A second volume of the manual will cover the more technical aspects of small area
estimation and will be primarily aimed at methodologists and technical analysts
involved in producing modeled small area estimates. The technical manual will cover
in more detail the methodological and statistical issues that arise in small area
estimation.
The content of this manual contains material on the application of basic statistical
models. The manual therefore assumes the reader has a basic familiarity with the
theory and application of such models. Some parts of the manual contain references
to somewhat more advanced methods. In such instances warning boxes strongly
recommend to the reader that further methodological advice should be obtained
from Methodology Division (ABS) before applying such techniques.
What it is - A Guide to:
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what issues need to be thought through before undertaking a small area exercise,
the methods and techniques available in small area estimation, the relative
advantages and disadvantages and assumptions involved in each,
who to talk to, who has implemented specific approaches into practice already and
where to find relevant documentation,
the trips and traps of putting various techniques into practice,
how to best measure the reliability of small area predictions,
how to detect model miss-specification and what diagnostics are available for
assessing the overall quality of small area estimates.
What it is not
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An up-to- date encyclopedia of all the literature on small area techniques. The focus
of this manual is much more on the practice of small area estimation in the
production of government statistics. Compiling and maintaining an up-to-date
summary of the technical literature would be highly resource intensive as the field is
relatively new and rapidly evolving. It would also make it more difficult for the
practitioner to access.
Finally, we emphasise that this manual has been written under the assumption that the
primary goal of small area data users is to obtain descriptive statistics of the relative
characteristics of small areas rather than obtain the form of some dynamic structural
process which generates those small area characteristics. The manual is therefore
premised upon a descriptive framework for the ultimate decision making objectives,
even though analytical methods are used to construct the models used to predict those
small area characteristics. In other words, we assume users are primarily interested in
the predictions from those models, not just the form and structure of the models per se.
Australian Bureau of Statistics 8