U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Department of Labor Logo United States Department of Labor
Dot gov

The .gov means it's official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you're on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Bureau of Labor Statistics > Office of Survey Methods Research > Publications > Browse Research Papers

Comparison of Nonparametric Methods With Parametric Methods for the CPS CATI/CAPI Mode Effects Analysis

Jenny Thompson and R. Parmer

Abstract

The analysis for mode effects in the CATI/CAPI Overlap Study has relied heavily on the two sample t-test. This test is popular because it is easily interpretable and fairly robust to the assumption of normality. The latter assumption is, however, difficult to verify with complex survey data. Moreover, the variance estimate used in the parametric analysis is not distributed as a Chi-Squared random variable. Therefore, we apply a variety of nonparametric methods to split panel data from the Basic CPS and Parallel Survey, and show a comparison of the results to the normal theory based results.