Evaluating the Use of Residential Mailing Addresses in a Metropolitan Household Survey

Abstract

We developed a sampling frame for a probability-based household survey by purchasing an exhaustive list of over 818,000 residential mailing addresses in Dallas County, Texas. The addresses were obtained from the Delivery Sequence File (DSF) offered by the US Postal Service (USPS) through a nonexclusive license agreement with private companies. The DSF is a computerized file that contains all delivery point addresses serviced by the USPS, with the exception of general delivery. We used the geographic coordinates of the addresses to construct digital maps of the immediate vicinity around each selected address to help the field interviewers locate the selected address. To evaluate the coverage of the mailing addresses, we selected a sub-sample of 2,498 addresses and used the Half-Open Interval (HOI) procedure (Kish 1965) to search for missed housing units in the interval between the selected address and the next address in delivery sequence order. A total of 46 missed addresses were found with the HOI procedure. Also, we found that the vast majority of persons who maintain a residential P.O. Box also have mail delivered to their street address. The 90 percent occupancy rate is consistent with other metropolitan household surveys that use traditional on-site enumeration methods.

A Direct Comparison of ABS and Telephone Sampling in a Pilot Study of Children’s Health

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Strategies for recruiting representative samples of Asian Americans for a population-based case–control study

“…Prior studies have suggested that ABS is more cost-effective than RDD, provides greater coverage of residential homes and produces higher response rates for research studies 23 24. Selected commercial companies have access to the US Postal Service's Delivery Sequence File, all addresses to which mail is delivered.…”

Bounce Back Now! Protocol of a population-based randomized controlled trial to examine the efficacy of a Web-based intervention with disaster-affected families

“…The concept of using the CDSF to generate a sampling frame was first examined by Iannacchione, Staab, and Redden (2003). Address-based sampling emerged as an alternative to manual enumeration to enfranchise individuals without landline phones, historically reached through random-digit dial (RDD) surveys.…”