What was the rule in designating whether a sample household was a “complete” household?
The concept of a “complete” household is used in the context of survey responses. The NHTS used a fifty-percent rule in deciding whether a household was a complete household. The fifty-percent rule states that if fifty or more percent of the adults (18 years or older) within a household completed the Person Interview (or Extended Survey), then this household was considered a complete household. The person weights were adjusted to account for non-interviewed persons within an interviewed household. The fifty-percent rule was adopted to address a concern that excluding households where some of the household members did not respond to the survey might bias the survey results. This concern was confirmed in a Federal Highway Administration-sponsored report where low-income households and large households (with four or more members) were found more likely not to respond to surveys than other households. In the NHTS, the household file contains information on all members of the household (suc
