4.1 INTEGRATION OF HES AND SIH
INTEGRATION OF HES AND SIH IN 2003-04
The 2003-04 SIH was integrated with the 2003-04 HES. This integration was achieved by selecting a subsample of the households in the SIH survey and asking them the additional questions required for HES purposes. The HES subsample comprised 6,957 of the 11,361 households responding to the SIH. The main advantages of integrating the surveys are:
- respondent burden is lower,
- the data collection costs are lower, and
- the resultant dataset is richer because HES and SIH results are more comparable than previously.
However, in order to achieve this integration, some changes were required to both surveys which impact on comparability with previous surveys.
In addition, it is possible that the integration of the surveys affected the non-response bias in the SIH. The response rates for the HES subsample are lower than achieved in the SIH-only sample component because of the reluctance of some respondents to provide the extra information required in the HES part of the survey. The non respondents to the 2003-04 survey may therefore have different characteristics to the non respondents of previous SIHs, resulting in different non-response biases.
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