An overview is presented of the design and field procedures of the US National Comorbidity Survey Replication Adolescent Supplement (NCS-A), a US face-to-face household survey of the prevalence and correlates of DSM-IV mental disorders. The survey was based on a dual-frame design that included 904 adolescent residents of the households that participated in the US National Comorbidity Survey Replication (85.9% response rate) and 9244 adolescent students selected from a nationally representative sample of 320 schools (74.7% response rate). After expositing the logic of dual-frame designs, comparisons are presented of sample and population distributions on Census socio-demographic variables and, in the school sample, school characteristics. These document only minor differences between the samples and the population. The results of statistical analysis of the bias-efficiency trade-off in weight trimming are then presented. These show that modest trimming meaningfully reduces mean squared error. Analysis of comparative sample efficiency shows that the household sample is more efficient than the school sample, leading to the household sample getting a higher weight relative to its size in the consolidated sample relative to the school sample. Taken together, these results show that the NCS-A is an efficient sample of the target population with good representativeness on a range of socio-demographic and geographic variables. 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd