**Potential Applications of the Method in Different Countries:** The lack of a national sample frame poses serious implementation-stage issues for many household surveys. An up-to-date digitized national sampling frame may not be available in some countries. The sampling frame might exist in other countries, but NSOs are unwilling to provide the World Bank and other international agencies access to the data. In other situations, the frame is based on the census enumeration areas, and because of their large spatial unit, conducting the second and third stages of sampling will cost a significant amount of money to achieve the necessary household size. Furthermore, if the sample selection is based on census enumeration areas, the household listing for the selected sampling units would also need additional time and resources because of their extensive spatial coverage and huge population totals. Our proposed method and strategy can be used to create a new national sampling frame if one of the previously described difficulties arises in future surveys conducted in other countries.

# **6 Conclusion**

This paper develops a new national sampling frame in the Republic of Armenia, serving as an example of developing nations with limited access to workable sampling frames for representative individual and household surveys. Specifically, pre-census enumeration areas (pre-EAs) have been created using an innovative approach for the automatic delineation of a national sampling frame, which offers strengths in various dimensions over other potential sources of sampling frames, such as those based on old census enumeration areas, census settlements, electoral precincts, and traditional gridded sampling.

The national sampling frame constructed in this paper divides the country into about 7,500 pre-EAs, most of which have population estimates strictly greater than zero. These population estimates are most recently updated and homogeneous, mostly between 100 and 1,000 people. The digitized enumeration areas with clear boundaries support the household selection, e.g., by enabling to avoid selecting households outside the selected PSUs.

Several methodological and practical contributions have been made to the survey sampling literature and entities that collect and leverage representative surveys, such as researchers and policy makers. The paper first extends the application of the semi-automatic approach for creating national sampling frames by generating the first digitized frame based on pre-EAs in Armenia as an alternative to traditional approaches to delineating national sampling frames. Our exercise and analysis on the new national sampling frame showcase the applicability of pre-EAs in other countries with similar challenges in the sampling frame. Second, our national sampling frame contributes to the survey collectors and users of household and individual surveys in Armenia by providing a standardized and decentralized frame. Third, the existing sample frames in the country have been systematically evaluated in comparison against the proposed frame by discussing their strengths and limitations. This suggests that our frame complements the existing potential sampling frames and can serve as an alternative.

The paper concludes with a caveat and a direction for future research. A new and workable national sampling frame has been proposed in this paper, resolving a challenge often faced by survey conductors in the first stage of the two-stage sampling design. However, solutions to the challenges faced in the second stage of the two-stage design, e.g., strategies to perform household listing, are outside the scope of this paper. So, future research can explore innovative ways to list the households in the country, for example, when using the sampling frame proposed in this paper.

28