Analysis of a Disaster Prevention Consciousness Survey using a Small Area Explicit Model-based Approach

Abstract

Park and Tsuchiya (2017) conducted a mail survey to determine residents\rq{} consciousness in a particular Japanese city, Tachikawa city, Tokyo. Ascertaining the consciousness of residents of smaller administrative divisions would be even more useful to better plan suitable services for the residents. However, there are concerns that such subdividing could reduce the sample size of respondents within each division, and the conventional approach used in public administration research might yield unreasonable estimates of consciousness level. We thus conducted a hybrid type confidence interval and adopted a ``model-based approach" to analyze the survey data, and compared the results with results obtained using the conventional approach. We found that the model-based approach dramatically reduced several large differences observed between estimates in each neighborhood and the lengths of the confidence intervals, both originally provided by the conventional approach. We also assessed the model-based approach by a Monte Carlo simulation study and comparison with recent census results for small areas in Japan. Although the model-based approach is well known in the field of small-area estimation, this is, to the best of our knowledge, the first study in Japan to adopt this approach for an analysis of a consciousness survey at small-area (cho-chome) level.