An application of adaptive sampling to estimate highly localized population segments

It is difficult to enumerate the people in India who are engaged in various small-scale industries in the unorganized sector because they are concentrated in small regional pockets. In estimating separately the total numbers of workers earning principally through ten respective single-industries in the unorganized small-scale sector in a specific district in rural India, through numerical illustrations we have two observations to report: (1) A traditional stratified two-stage sampling scheme is ineffective for some of the industries because of failures to capture the earners concentrated in priorly unknown locations. (2) An adaptive sampling scheme extending the initial sample by appropriate ‘network’ formations based on well-defined ‘neighbourhoods’ brings about dramatic improvements exploiting clustering tendencies of earners by different industries. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]