SUMMARY The polya posterior gives a noninformative Bayesian justification for various single-stage sampling procedures. Here this type of reasoning is extended to two-stage cluster sampling problems. The frequency properties of the resulting procedures are studied.

The precision of parameters estimation are determined by the sample size and the sampling design used in a study. Due to such practical constraints as the budget and manpower, most large-scale educational studies would not adopt the simple random sampling design. TIMSS 2007 used a two-stage stratified cluster sampling design. In the first stage, about 150 schools were selected according to some...

To evaluate the performance of the empirical predictors presented in San Martino et al. (2005), we compute the cases where they are the best, “equivalent” to the best (tables 1) or poor (table2). We consider only the case of equal unknown within cluster variances. First, we consider the cases in which each of the proposed predictors has the best performance, i.e. we compute the percentage of ca...

Prediction of random effects is an important problem with expanding applications. In the simplest context, the problem corresponds to prediction of the latent value (the mean) of a realized cluster selected via two-stage sampling. Best linear unbiased predictors developed from mixed models are widely used, but their development requires distributional assumptions or an infinite population frame...

Cluster sampling is common in survey practice, and the corresponding inference has been predominantly design-based. We develop a Bayesian framework for cluster sampling and account for the design effect in the outcome modeling. We consider a two-stage cluster sampling design where the clusters are first selected with probability proportional to cluster size, and then units are randomly sampled ...

There are some experiences that researcher come across quite number of time for very large networks in the initial samples such that they cannot finish the sampling procedure. Two solutions have been proposed and used by marine biologists which we discuss in this article: i) Adaptive cluster sampling based on order statistics with a stopping rule, ii) Restricted adaptive cluster sampling. Until...