Cloud Publications International Journal of Advanced Remote Sensing and GIS 2016, Volume 5, Issue 10, pp. 1908-1914 ISSN 2320 - 0243, Crossref: 10.23953/cloud.ijarsg.78 ______________________________________________________________________________________________________ Geospatial Techniques in Health Survey to Overcome the Lack of Sampling Frame Elangovan A., Elavarsu G., Ezhil R., Prabu R., and Yuvaraj J. National Institute of Epidemiology (ICMR), Ayapakkam, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India Publication Date: 14 October 2016 DOI: https://doi.org/10.23953/cloud.ijarsg.78 Copyright © 2016 Elangovan A., Elavarsu G., Ezhil R., Prabu R., and Yuvaraj J. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Sampling frame is a complete list of items or population from which a sample is drawn. More often researchers face difficulties in getting an up to date line list of sampling units, especially in the field where rapid changes are frequent. In household surveys it is difficult as newly constructed houses are seen as a continuous process in urban as well as rural areas. To overcome this issue, in this paper, we proposed a novel method by using Google-Earth with the GIS technologies. A study was done with the primary objective to identify the health impact of people living in and around quarries/crusher units at Thiruneermalai region nearer to Chennai. Since the boundary of the study area is found to be radial, it was difficult in getting the complete line list of the people living within the required radius. To overcome the issue the entire region was divided into small 30 x 30 meter grid cells. A total of 43652 sampling units (grid cells) formed the sampling frame. Among them, the required sample size was selected for the study. This method of GIS based grid sampling serve as an alternate tool for developing sampling frame with no or least cost. Keywords Geographical Information System; Grid Sampling; Sampling Frame 1. Introduction Sampling is an easy scientific method for investigating the entire population for assessing the outcome of interest [1-2]. Though various methods are available for deriving the representative samples from the population, simple random sampling method is considered to be more generalizable that represents the whole population since each individual in the sampling frame has equal chance of getting selected for evaluation [1-2]. Availability of sampling frame is a pre-requisite for deriving a sample using this method [3]. However in resource limited settings availability of reliable sampling frame is unlikely [4]. The available resources such as census enumeration did not have the location/ household identifier details moreover in the rapidly expanding population settings. The recent advances in technology related to Geographical Information System (GIS) and spatial analysis has paved way for overcoming limitations in the random sampling method. The GIS technology is being widely used in sampling natural resources and phenomena such as geological surveys, plant sampling, mineral deposition, bio-fuel exploration etc [5]. Spatial sampling does not rely on the sampling frame and building the sampling frame is not feasible in these cases. Sampling frame is Open Access Methodology Article