Jordan has carried out Population and Housing Censuses on regular intervals, with the last one in late 2015. What was particularly attractive about the latest census from the perspective of sampling was that it explicitly asked about the nationality of all residents. This would have allowed stratification of areas by density of Syrians. However, the original design could not be implemented because we could not access the new sample frame based on the 2015 Jordanian census. The design was then amended to include a representative sample of the Azraq and Za'atari camps (which account for the vast majority of Syrian refugees in camps in Jordan). This sample was complemented by purposive samples of the surrounding governorates, Mafraq and Zarqa, where the sample included areas physically proximate to the camp and other areas with a high number of Syrian refugees. In Amman Governorate, a purposive sample was drawn, combining a geographically distributed sample with a sample of areas with a high prevalence of Syrian refugees per the 2015 census, as indicated by the Jordanian Department of Statistics. Analytically, this implies the insights from Jordan will be limited to camp residents, neighboring areas of the camps, and Amman governorate. For this reason, Amman is left out of the rest of the discussion, where our focus is on relating the innovative approaches that we followed to obtain near-representative sample in absence of recent sampling frame.
Note: A more detailed description of the sample design is presented in Section 2 of "Survey Design and Sampling: A methodology note for the 2015-16 surveys of Syrian refugees and host communities in Jordan, Lebanon and Kurdistan, Iraq" document.
