Geospatial Techniques in Health Survey to Overcome the Lack of Sampling Frame

Abstract

Sampling frame is a complete list of items or population from which a sample is drawn. More often researchers face difficulties in getting an up to date line list of sampling units, especially in the field where rapid changes are frequent. In household surveys it is difficult as newly constructed houses are seen as a continuous process in urban as well as rural areas. To overcome this issue, in this paper, we proposed a novel method by using Google-Earth with the GIS technologies. A study was done with the primary objective to identify the health impact of people living in and around quarries/crusher units at Thiruneermalai region nearer to Chennai. Since the boundary of the study area is found to be radial, it was difficult in getting the complete line list of the people living within the required radius. To overcome the issue the entire region was divided into small 30 x 30 meter grid cells. A total of 43652 sampling units (grid cells) formed the sampling frame. Among them, the required sample size was selected for the study. This method of GIS based grid sampling serve as an alternate tool for developing sampling frame with no or least cost.