Design of the Understanding Society ethnic minority boost sample

The overall sample design for Understanding Society has been described in an earlier working paper in this series (Lynn 2009). This paper describes the special measures taken to boost the sample of members of five key minority ethnic groups in Great Britain. A new method was developed to estimate the ethnic density of postal sectors in 2007, when the most recent Census data was collected in 2001. Key stages from then on were: excluding sectors with low minority populations; selecting addresses using fractions which over-sampled areas with high densities of the scarcest groups; sub-sampling sectors with low expected yields; and screening in the field to identify target households.