households of size 1-12 with category 13 reflecting households of size 13 and over,
and re-weighting was done at the stratum level. A danger of re-weighting along one
dimension, household size in this case, is that survey variables that were representative
using the ‘old’ weights become non-representative once the weights have been
adjusted to control for unrepresentativeness in other dimensions. On the other hand,
if the adjustment corrects for a genuine sampling error, the comparability between
the survey and the census should improve in all dimensions. As a check on the appropriateness
of re-weighting, we compared the set of variables that were considered
identical on the basis of wording, coding and enumerator instructions and how
many passed the survey-census means comparison test before and after re-weighting.
Re-weighting increased the number of variables that passed this test in all rural
strata considerably, while improving the fit for household size related variables.