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Re: More on "Weight"

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"Manny & Hilary" wrote:

>>Can you use the “weight” variable with any other variable?  For example is you want to know the total # of units with rents between $0 and $500 in an SMSA,
then can you get a subset of data that meets that criteria and sum the weight for the observations to get an estimate of the total # of units in the SMSA
with rents between $0 and $500?<<

WEIGHT should be used whenever you want to get a an estimate of the number of housing units in the universe of the survey. This also applies to subgroups, as you described. You should also use the weights when computing means, medians, and similar descriptive statistics. It's not as important if you are doing modeling, such as regression.

What kind of software are you using to perform your computations? Most statistical packages have a way for you to tell them what the weight variable is. Once you've done that, you don't have to worry about it yourself.

Dav Vandenbroucke
Economist
U.S. Dept. HUD
david_a._vandenbroucke@hud.gov
202-708-1060 ext. 5890