Alternative Estimation Method for a Three-Stage Cluster Sampling in Finite Population

This research investigates the use of a three-stage cluster sampling design in estimating population total. We focus on a special design where certain number of visits is being considered for estimating the population size and a weighted factor of / is introduced. In particular, attempt was made at deriving new method for a three-stage sampling design. In this study, we compared the newly proposed estimator with some of the existing estimators in a three-stage sampling design. Eight (8) data sets were used to justify this paper. The first four (4) data sets were obtained from[1],[2],[3] and[4] respectively while the second four (4) data sets represent the number of diabetic patients in Niger state, Nigeria for the years 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008 respectively. The computation was done with software developed in Microsoft Visual C++ programming language. All the estimates obtained show that our newly proposed three-stage cluster sampling design estimator performs better.