Demands for care are met not only by professional care services but as well by family members and friends, especially by partners and children. These personal resources are not equally available to everyone. Moreover, there may be differences in preferences when choosing between alternative care...

Nonresponse in surveys may result in a distortion of the distribution of interest. In a panel survey the participation behavior in later waves is different from the participation behavior at the start. With register data that cover also the information for non-respondents one can observe a fade...

In this paper, a weight is derived for the calculation of design based estimators of totals, means and proportions using the ongoing German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) and a new cross-sectional sample. In the first part of the paper, the selection schemes of the subsamples A, B, C and D of the...

We propose a new view of initial nonresponse bias in longitudinal surveys. Under certain conditions, an initial bias may "fade-away" over consecutive waves. This effect is discussed in a Markovian framework. A general contraction theorem for time inhomogeneous Markov chains is presented. The...