Stratum Collapse

If there is only one sampling unit in a stratum, then PROC SURVEYREG cannot estimate the variance for this stratum for the Taylor series method. To estimate stratum variances, by default the procedure collapses, or combines, those strata that contain only one sampling unit. If you specify the NOCOLLAPSE option in the STRATA statement, PROC SURVEYREG does not collapse strata and uses a variance estimate of zero for any stratum that contains only one sampling unit.

Note that stratum collapse only applies to Taylor series variance estimation (the default method, also specified by VARMETHOD=TAYLOR). The procedure does not collapse strata for BRR or jackknife variance estimation, which you request with the VARMETHOD=BRR or VARMETHOD=JACKKNIFE option.

If you do not specify the NOCOLLAPSE option for the Taylor series method, PROC SURVEYREG collapses strata according to the following rules. If there are multiple strata that contain only one sampling unit each, then the procedure collapses, or combines, all these strata into a new pooled stratum. If there is only one stratum with a single sampling unit, then PROC SURVEYREG collapses that stratum with the preceding stratum, where strata are ordered by the STRATA variable values. If the stratum with one sampling unit is the first stratum, then the procedure combines it with the following stratum.

If you specify stratum sampling rates by using the RATE=SAS-data-set option, PROC SURVEYREG computes the sampling rate for the new pooled stratum as the weighted average of the sampling rates for the collapsed strata. See the section Computational Details for details. If the specified sampling rate equals 0 for any of the collapsed strata, then the pooled stratum is assigned a sampling rate of 0. If you specify stratum totals by using the TOTAL=SAS-data-set option, PROC SURVEYREG combines the totals for the collapsed strata to compute the sampling rate for the new pooled stratum.