OCTOBER 7, 2010

A Statistics Canada Study Reveals Important Errors in a Voluntary Census

Quoted from the Globe and Mail, September 9, 2010 and the analysis of the Marketing Research and Intelligence Association.

A study recently published by Statistics Canada revealed that considerable errors could occur in censuses conducted on a voluntary basis. Statistics Canada came to this conclusion after statisticians compared simulated answers that would be obtained on the 2B Census questionnaire should it be administered on a voluntary basis to the actual data gathered as part of the 2001 and 2006 censuses. The study's objective was to get a sense of the data that would have been obtained had the long Census form been administered on a voluntary basis in 2006. It also compared those simulated data to the actual data.

More specifically, a trend reversal (when comparing the 2001 actual Census data to the 2006 actual Census data and to the 2006 simulated Census data) was observed for the following characteristics:

• Recent immigrants;
• Not a landed immigrant;
• "Other" citizenship;
• Knowledge of English;
• Knowledge of French;
• French as mother tongue;
• Movers to a different Census subdivision; and
• Full-time workers.

Moreover, for the following characteristics, the general trend was the same for the simulated and actual 2006 Census data, but the difference between the two trends (when compared to the actual 2001 Census data) was greater than 1 percent.

• Renters;
• Two-person households;
• Landed immigrants;
• Year of immigration before 1961;
• Recent immigration (last 10 years);
• Mother tongue other than French or English;
• Visible minorities (all);
• Education – high school or less;
• University degree;
• Movers, same Census subdivision one year ago;
• Movers, same Census subdivision 5 years ago;
• Movers, changing Census subdivision 5 years ago;
• Employed persons;
• Paid workers;
• Total income ($1-$19,999);
• Total income ($40,000 and over); and
• Wages ($1-$19,999).

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