Suguru Mizunoya writes:

When we estimate the number of people from a national sampling survey (such as labor force survey) using sampling weights, don’t we obtain underestimated number of people, if the country’s population is growing and the sampling frame is based on an old census data? In countries with increasing populations, the probability of inclusion changes over time, but the weights can’t be adjusted frequently because census takes place only once every five or ten years.

I am currently working for UNICEF for a project on estimating number of out-of-school children in developing countries. The project leader is comfortable to use estimates of number of people from DHS and other surveys. But, I am concerned that we may need to adjust the estimated number of people by the population projection, otherwise the estimates will be underestimated.

I googled around on this issue, but I could not find a right article or paper on this.

My reply: I don’t know if there’s a paper on this particular topic, but, yes, I think it would be standard to do some demographic analysis and extrapolate the population characteristics using some model, then poststratify on the estimated current population.

P.S. Speaking of out-of-date censuses, I just hope you’re not working with data from Lebanon!