Summary

Bryant, Hartley & Jessen (1960) presented a two-way stratification sampling design when the sample size n is less than the number of strata. Their design was extended to a three-way stratification case by Chaudhary & Kumar (1988), but this design does not take into account serial correlation, which might be present as a result of the presence of a time variable. In this paper, a new sampling procedure is presented for three-way stratification when one of the stratifying variables is time. The purpose of such a design is to take into account serial correlation. The variance of the unweighted estimator of the population mean with respect to a super population model is used as the basis for comparison. Simulation results show that the suggested design is more efficient than the Chaudhary & Kumar (1988) design. Key words: controlled selection; serial correlation; time scale; time variable. 1