Each week, we select a recently published Open Access article to feature. This week’s article comes from Applied Stochastic Models in Business and Industry   and presents sampling strategy on the “Situation and perspectives of Italian enterprises during the COVID-19 health emergency” quick survey. 

The article’s abstract is given below, with the full article available to read here.

Casciano, MC, Varriale, R. The Italian quick survey on the effects of the COVID-19 health emergency on businesses: Sampling strategy and data editing. Appl Stochastic Models Bus Ind. 2023; 1– 12. doi: 10.1002/asmb.2761

During the first phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, Istat performed the quick survey “Situation and perspectives of Italian enterprises during the COVID-19 health emergency,” with the aim of assessing the economic situation and the specific actions adopted by businesses to reduce the economic impacts of the emergency. To ensure the continuity in the information flow and to analyze the temporal evolution of the observed phenomena, the survey has been repeated in three different waves. The outcomes of each wave was released just after 2 months from the launch of the survey. The present work analyses the characteristics of the sampling strategy and describes the complexity of the data editing process, in the case of a survey planned to produce estimates able to ensure an acceptable level of accuracy in the maximum timeliness.