Undercoverage Rates and Undercoverage Bias in Traditional Housing Unit Listing

Many face-to-face surveys use field staff to create lists of
housing units from which samples are selected. However, housing
unit listing is vulnerable to errors of undercoverage: Some housing
units are missed and have no chance to be selected. Such errors are
not routinely measured and documented in survey reports. This study
jointly investigates the rate of undercoverage, the correlates of
undercoverage, and the bias in survey data due to undercoverage in
listed housing unit frames. Working with the National Survey of
Family Growth, we estimate an undercoverage rate for traditional
listing efforts of 13.6 percent. We find that multiunit status,
rural areas, and map difficulties strongly correlate with
undercoverage. We find significant bias in estimates of variables
such as birth control use, pregnancies, and income. The results
have important implications for users of data from surveys based on
traditionally listed housing unit frames.