Adjusting for Misclassification: A Three-Phase Sampling Approach

The United States Department of Agriculture's National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) conducts the June Agricultural Survey (JAS) annually. Substantial misclassification occurs during the pre-screening process and from field-estimating farm status for non-response and inaccessible records, resulting in a biased estimate of the number of US farms from the JAS. Here the Annual Land Utilization Survey (ALUS) is proposed as a follow-on survey to the JAS to adjust the estimates of the number of US farms and other important variables. A three-phase survey design-based estimator is developed for the JAS-ALUS with non-response adjustment for the second phase (ALUS). A design-unbiased estimator of the variance is provided in explicit form.