AN ALTERNATIVE ITEM COUNT TECHNIQUE IN SENSITIVE SURVEYS

The present study is basically meant to propose an improved item count technique which will mainly have an impact on sensitive fields such as health care. It is attempted to highlight the scope of the proposal relative to the usual and existing methods serving the same purpose. The proposed improved Item Count Technique (ICT) has the major advantage that it does not require two subsamples (as is the case in usual ICT) and there is no need of finding optimum subsample sizes. The proposed ICT has been observed performing well, as compared to the usual ICT, in terms of relative efficiency. The innovative method of Randomized Response (RR) technique has also been compared with the proposed ICT and it is found that the proposed technique uniformly performs better when the number of innocuous items is greater than 3.