The housing experiences of new Canadians: Insights from the Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Canada (LSIC)

Appendix B: LSIC survey designFootnote 29

The frame for the LSIC is an administrative database of all landed immigrants to Canada which comes from Citizenship and Immigration Canada. The database, known as FOSS (Field Operation Support System), includes various characteristics of each immigrant that can be used for survey design purposes, such as: name; age; sex; mother tongue; country of origin; knowledge of English and/or French; category of immigrant; date of landing; and intended province of destination in Canada.

The survey was designed based on probability sampling theory, using a two-stage stratified sampling method. The first stage involved the selection of the immigrating unit (IU) using a probability proportional to size (PPS) method. The size was defined as the number of immigrants in the IU. The second stage involved the random selection of one IU member within each selected IU. The selected member of the IU is called the longitudinal respondent (LR). Only the LR will be followed throughout the survey and no interviews will be conducted with other members of the IU or the LR’s household.

To ensure reliable estimates and to satisfy various requirements of federal and provincial government departments, the sample was stratified by month of landing, province of destination and class of immigrant, and the following subgroups were over-sampled:

  1. Government sponsored refugees;
  2. Refugees other than government sponsored;
  3. Entrepreneur and investor immigrants (“Economic-Business”);
  4. Family immigrants in British Columbia;
  5. Overall immigrants in Alberta, and;
  6. Economic immigrants in Quebec (“Economic-Skilled” and “Economic-Business”).

As a result of sampling, the sample of immigrants becomes representative of the target population only through the use of the survey weight. The survey weight can be thought of as the number of immigrants in the population represented by a sampled immigrant. The estimates presented earlier in this document are weighted estimates. To ensure reliable estimates at wave three, a minimum sample size of at least 5,755 respondents is required. The determination of the initial sample size was based on several sample attrition hypotheses applied to the wave three minimum sample size requirements. As a result, 20,322 immigrants were selected for the wave one interview, of which 12,040 agreed to participate.

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