I carried out what I thought was going to be a very simple piece of work the other day, slicing up some of the questions from a publicly available dataset in order to compare Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust with some other sites based on particular features of interest. I will post that work some other time, for now for those who are interested the source code is here.
In the meantime, I thought I would share my experience with the book which helped me through this work, which is here.
Complex surveys: A guide to analysis using R, which accompanies the survey package (or vice versa?), was a real joy for me to use. As the author explains in the book, complex survey designs are everywhere, and I confess I have been rather ignoring them in my work. There is just the right mix of code, equations, explanation, and some truly wonderful graphics in this book to equip you to deal with them.
So don’t be frightened of complex survey designs! Beg, borrow, or buy this book and get analysing!