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ERIC Number: ED628288
Record Type: Non-Journal
Publication Date: 2023-Mar-31
Pages: 21
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: N/A
EISSN: N/A
Available Date: N/A
Multilevel Calibration Weighting for Survey Data
Eli Ben-Michael; Avi Feller; Erin Hartman
Grantee Submission
In the November 2016 U.S. presidential election, many state level public opinion polls, particularly in the Upper Midwest, incorrectly predicted the winning candidate. One leading explanation for this polling miss is that the precipitous decline in traditional polling response rates led to greater reliance on statistical methods to adjust for the corresponding bias--and that these methods failed to adjust for important interactions between key variables like educational attainment, race, and geographic region. Finding calibration weights that account for important interactions remains challenging with traditional survey methods: raking typically balances the margins alone, while post-stratification, which exactly balances all interactions, is only feasible for a small number of variables. In this paper, we propose multilevel calibration weighting, which enforces tight balance constraints for marginal balance and looser constraints for higher-order interactions. This incorporates some of the benefits of post-stratification while retaining the guarantees of raking. We then correct for the bias due to the relaxed constraints via a flexible outcome model; we call this approach Double Regression with Post-stratification (DRP). We use these tools to to re-assess a large-scale survey of voter intention in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, finding meaningful gains from the proposed methods. The approach is available in the multical R package. [This is the online version of an article published in "Political Analysis."]
Publication Type: Reports - Evaluative
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: Institute of Education Sciences (ED)
Authoring Institution: N/A
IES Funded: Yes
Grant or Contract Numbers: R305D200010
Author Affiliations: N/A