Population weight for multi-country aggregation. The population weight is included for comparisons across countries and is included to adjust for a country’s proportion in the sample relative to its actual population of the total population of all countries in the survey. The weights are thus at the country level and do not need to be included for single country, regional level analyses or analyses where comparing country averages of certain survey items are of interest where the country-level is the primary unit of comparison. However, in obtaining sample-wide (or EU-wide) means or proportions, it is recommended to use the population weights.
The Pweight helps to correct for any potential bias in obtaining means, proportion, etc when combining data from two or more countries. Without the Pweight, the researcher risks (most often) over-represent smaller countries at the expense of larger ones. The Pweight thus is included to adjust so that every country is represented in relative proportion to its population size of the countries in the sample for each year.
The population size weight is calculated as PWEIGHT= (Population size aged 18 years and above)/(Net sample size in the country). Population data of the population is taken from Eurostat for the year 2016.
Type of variable: Continuous