¹King Abdulaziz University, Faculty of Sciences, Department of Statistics, Jeddah, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Quaid-I-Azam University, Department of Statistics, Islamabad, Pakistan. Professor. Email: zhlangah@yahoo.com
²Quaid-I-Azam University, Department of Statistics, Islamabad, Pakistan. Professor. Email: alishah_ejaz@yahoo.com
³Quaid-I-Azam University, Department of Statistics, Islamabad, Pakistan. Professor. Email: jsqau@yahoo.com

The present study is basically meant to propose an improved item count technique which will mainly have an impact on sensitive fields such as health care. It is attempted to highlight the scope of the proposal relative to the usual and existing methods serving the same purpose. The proposed improved Item Count Technique (ICT) has the major advantage that it does not require two subsamples (as is the case in usual ICT) and there is no need of finding optimum subsample sizes. The proposed ICT has been observed performing well, as compared to the usual ICT, in terms of relative efficiency. The innovative method of Randomized Response (RR) technique has also been compared with the proposed ICT and it is found that the proposed technique uniformly performs better when the number of innocuous items is greater than 3.

Key words: Health surveys, Privacy, Proportion estimation, Randomized response, Sensitive question.

El presente articulo propone una técnica de conteo de items con aplicaciones principalmente en el campo de la salud. Se muestran las ventajas de nuestra propuesta y de otros métodos que sirven con el mismo fin. La técnica de conteo de ítems propuesta (ICT, por su sigla en inglés) tiene la ventaja de que no requiere dos submuestras (como es el caso en el ICT clásico) y no es necesario de encontrar los tamaños de las submuestras óptimos. El ICT propuesto tiene un mejor comportamiento en términos de eficiencia relativa. El método de la técnica de respuesta aleatorizada (RR, por su sigla en inglés) es también comparado con el ICT propuesto y se encuentra que la técnica propuesta se desempeña mejor cuando el número de ítems inocuos es mayor de 3.

Palabras clave: encuestas de salud, estimación de la proporción, preguntas sensibles, privacidad, respuesta al azar.

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