On the impact of bootstrap in survey sampling and small-area estimation

Development of valid bootstrap procedures has been a challenging problem for survey samplers for the last two decades. This is due to the fact that in surveys we constantly face various complex issues such as complex correlation structure induced by the survey design, weighting, imputation, small-area estimation, among others. In this paper, we critically review various bootstrap methods developed to deal with these challenging issues. We discuss two applications where the bootstrap has been found to be effective.