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Description:

The Canadian Labour Force Survey (LFS) is the official source of monthly estimates of total employment and unemployment. Following the 2011 census, the LFS underwent a sample redesign to account for the evolution of the population and labour market characteristics, to adjust to changes in the information needs and to update the geographical information used to carry out the survey. The redesign program following the 2011 census culminated with the introduction of a new sample at the beginning of 2015. This report is a reference on the methodological aspects of the LFS, covering stratification, sampling, collection, processing, weighting, estimation, variance estimation and data quality.

Description:

This working paper presents a methodology to measure remoteness at the community level. The method takes into account some of the recent literature on the subject, as well as new computational opportunities provided by the integration of official statistics with data from non-official statistical sources. The approach that was used in the computations accounts for multiple points of access to services; it also establishes a continuum between communities with different transportation infrastructures and connectivity while at the same time retaining the information on the community transportation infrastructures in the database. In addition, a method to implement accessibility measures to selected services is also outlined and a sample of accessibility measures are computed.

Description:

The Quality Assurance Framework (QAF) serves as the highest-level governance tool for quality management at Statistics Canada. The QAF gives an overview of the quality management and risk mitigation strategies used by the Agency’s program areas. The QAF is used in conjunction with Statistics Canada management practices, such as those described in the Quality Guidelines.

Description:

These analytical products present projections of the diversity of the Canadian population. The purpose of these projections is to paint a potential portrait of the composition of Canada’s population according to different ethnocultural and language characteristics, if certain population growth scenarios were to become reality in the future. Produced using Demosim, a microsimulation model, these projections cover characteristics such as place of birth, generation status, visible minority group, religion and mother tongue.

Description:

This document briefly describes Demosim, the microsimulation population projection model, how it works as well as its methods and data sources. It is a methodological complement to the analytical products produced using Demosim.

Description:

Immigrants comprise an ever-increasing percentage of the Canadian population—at more than 20%, which is the highest percentage among the G8 countries (Statistics Canada 2013a). This figure is expected to rise to 25% to 28% by 2031, when at least one in four people living in Canada will be foreign-born (Statistics Canada 2010).

This report summarizes the linkage of the Immigrant Landing File (ILF) for all provinces and territories, excluding Quebec, to hospital data from the Discharge Abstract Database (DAD), a national database containing information about hospital inpatient and day-surgery events. A deterministic exact-matching approach was used to link data from the 1980-to-2006 ILF and from the DAD (2006/2007, 2007/2008 and 2008/2009) with the 2006 Census, which served as a “bridge” file. This was a secondary linkage in that it used linkage keys created in two previous projects (primary linkages) that separately linked the ILF and the DAD to the 2006 Census. The ILF–DAD linked data were validated by means of a representative sample of 2006 Census records containing immigrant information previously linked to the DAD.

Description:

This package was designed to help users access and manipulate the public use microdata file (PUMF – provincial) for the 2014 General Social Survey (GSS) on Canadians’ Safety (Victimization). It contains the PUMF data and describes the objectives, methodology and estimation procedures for this survey as well as guidelines for releasing estimates.

Statistics Canada collected data on the topic of Canadians’ safety (Victimization) for the sixth time in 2014. Data were previously collected in 1988 (Cycle 3), 1993 (Cycle 8), 1999 (Cycle 13), 2004 (Cycle 18) and 2009 (Cycle 23). The 2014 provincial GSS collected data from persons aged 15 years and over living in private households in Canada, excluding residents of the Yukon, Northwest Territories and Nunavut and full time residents of institutions.

Between 2009 and 2014, the core content of the survey was revised in a number of ways, based on experience gained from earlier iterations. Some questions were revised to improve their clarity for respondents, and others were added or dropped following consultations with stakeholders from the justice sector, government and academic communities.

Description:

Changes in health status may affect not just the individuals who experience such changes, but also their family members. For example, if the main earner in a family loses his or her ability to generate income due to a health shock, it invariably affects the financial situation of the spouse and other dependents. In addition, spouses and working-age children may themselves increase or reduce their labour supply to make up for the lost income (“added worker effect”) or care for a sick family member (“caregiver effect”). Since consumption smoothing and self-insurance occur at the household level, the financial effects of health for other family members have important policy implications. To shed light on such effects, this study analyzes how one spouse’s cancer diagnosis affects the employment and earnings of the other spouse and (before-tax) total family income using administrative data from Canada.

Description: Children younger than age 18 enumerated in the 2006 Census who lived in Toronto, Montreal or Vancouver were linked to published air pollution exposure land use regression models to assign exposure at the Dissemination Area level. Associations between both socioeconomic and visible minority status and exposure to ambient nitrogen dioxide among children in these three cities were examined in a series of regression models.

Description:

The data are from the Canadian Cancer Registry, with mortality follow-up through record linkage to the Canadian Vital Statistics Death Database. Increases in five-year relative survival ratios between 1992-to-1994 and 2006-to-2008 were calculated by age and sex for all leukemias combined and for each of the main types.

Description:

The first in this series is the Consulting Engineering Services Price Index (CEPI) which is an annual index that measures changes in the prices for services provided by consulting engineers. These services encompass advisory and design work as well as construction or project management. They are provided for many types of projects (fields of specialization), and to both Canadian and foreign clients. Price indexes are published for 10 fields of specialization as well as for national, regional, and foreign markets.

Description:

The National Population Health Survey (NPHS) is designed to enhance the understanding of the processes affecting health. The survey collects cross-sectional as well as longitudinal data. In 1994/95 the survey interviewed a panel of 17,276 individuals, then returned to interview them a second time in 1996/97. The response rate for these individuals was 96% in 1996/97. Data collection from the panel will continue for up to two decades. For cross-sectional purposes, data were collected for a total of 81,000 household residents in all provinces (except people on Indian reserves or on Canadian Forces bases) in 1996/97.

This overview illustrates the variety of information available by presenting data on perceived health, chronic conditions, injuries, repetitive strains, depression, smoking, alcohol consumption, physical activity, consultations with medical professionals, use of medications and use of alternative medicine.

Description:

Documentation to accompany public-use microdata files. Contains a detailed description of the survey design, content and methods, as well as the record layout and the data dictionary.

Description:

Cycle 10 collected data from persons 15 years and older and concentrated on the respondent's family. Topics covered include marital history, common- law unions, biological, adopted and step children, family origins, child leaving and fertility intentions.

The target population of the GSS (General Social Survey) consisted of all individuals aged 15 and over living in a private household in one of the ten provinces.

Description:

The objective of this study was to determine if the prevalence of overweight and obesity is associated with neighbourhood walkability. The analysis tested whether a dose-response relationship between the Street Smart Walk Score® and various measures of physical activity, overweight, and obesity existed in a large, population-based sample of adults in urban and suburban Ontario.

Description:

Discrepancies between self-reported and objectively measured physical activity are well-known. For the purpose of validation, this study compares a new self-reported physical activity questionnaire with an existing one and with accelerometer data.

Description:

The 2012/2013 Canadian Health Measures Survey collected audiometric and self-reported data to estimate the prevalence of hearing loss and limitations in a population-based sample of Canadians. This study presents an analysis of CHMS audiometric and self-reported hearing data for adults aged 20 to 79.

Description:

The Cancer Risk Management Model incorporates the risk of developing cancer, disease screening and clinical management with cost and labour data to assess health outcomes and economic impact. A screening module added to the lung cancer module enables a variety of scenarios to be evaluated for different target populations with varying rates of participation, compliance, and frequency of low-dose computed tomography screening.

Description:

This new dataset increases the information available for comparing the performance of provinces and territories across a range of measures. It combines often fragmented provincial time series data that, as such, are of limited utility for examining the evolution of provincial economies over extended periods. More advanced statistical methods, and models with greater breadth and depth, are difficult to apply to existing fragmented Canadian data. The longitudinal nature of the new provincial dataset remedies this shortcoming. This report explains the construction of the latest vintage of the dataset. The dataset contains the most up-to-date information available.

Description:

Using data from the Provincial KLEMS database, this paper asks whether provincial economies have undergone structural change in their business sectors since 2000. It does so by applying a measure of industrial change (the dissimilarity index) using measures of output (real GDP) and hours worked. The paper also develops a statistical methodology to test whether the shifts in the industrial composition of output and hours worked over the period are due to random year-over-year changes in industrial structure or long-term systematic change in the structure of provincial economies. The paper is designed to inform discussion and analysis of recent changes in industrial composition at the national level, notably, the decline in manufacturing output and the concomitant rise of resource industries, and the implications of this change for provincial economies.

Description:

Although weights are widely used in survey sampling their ultimate justification from the design perspective is often problematical. Here we will argue for a stepwise Bayes justification for weights that does not depend explicitly on the sampling design. This approach will make use of the standard kind of information present in auxiliary variables however it will not assume a model relating the auxiliary variables to the characteristic of interest. The resulting weight for a unit in the sample can be given the usual interpretation as the number of units in the population which it represents.

Description:

In most surveys all sample units receive the same treatment and the same design features apply to all selected people and households. In this paper, it is explained how survey designs may be tailored to optimize quality given constraints on costs. Such designs are called adaptive survey designs. The basic ingredients of such designs are introduced, discussed and illustrated with various examples.

Description:

A considerable limitation of current methods for automatic data editing is that they treat all edits as hard constraints. That is to say, an edit failure is always attributed to an error in the data. In manual editing, however, subject-matter specialists also make extensive use of soft edits, i.e., constraints that identify (combinations of) values that are suspicious but not necessarily incorrect. The inability of automatic editing methods to handle soft edits partly explains why in practice many differences are found between manually edited and automatically edited data. The object of this article is to present a new formulation of the error localisation problem which can distinguish between hard and soft edits. Moreover, it is shown how this problem may be solved by an extension of the error localisation algorithm of De Waal and Quere (2003).

Description:

SILC (Statistics on Income and Living Conditions) is an annual European survey that measures the population's income distribution, poverty and living conditions. It has been conducted in Switzerland since 2007, based on a four-panel rotation scheme that yields both cross-sectional and longitudinal estimates. This article examines the problem of estimating the variance of the cross-sectional poverty and social exclusion indicators selected by Eurostat. Our calculations take into account the non-linearity of the estimators, total non-response at different survey stages, indirect sampling and calibration. We adapt the method proposed by Lavallée (2002) for estimating variance in cases of non-response after weight sharing, and we obtain a variance estimator that is asymptotically unbiased and very easy to program.

Description:

Statistics Canada publishes several measures of farm income, each produced for a different purpose. This bulletin describes the concepts behind these different measures, the methods by which the measures are constructed, and the uses for which they were designed.

Description:

This report explains the concept of income and provides definitions of the various sources of income and derived income variables. It also documents the various aspects of the census that can have an impact on census income estimates.

Description:

This paper states how SN is preparing for a new era in the making of statistics, as it is triggered by technological and methodological developments. An essential feature of the turn to the new era is the farewell to the stovepipe way of data processing. The paper discusses how new technological and methodological tools will affect processes and their organization. Special emphasis is put on one of the major chances and challenges the new tools offer: establishing coherence in the content of statistics and in the presentation to users.

Description:

The Longitudinal Immigration Database (IMDB) links immigration and taxation administrative records into a comprehensive source of data on the labour market behaviour of the landed immigrant population in Canada. It covers the period 1980 to 1995 and will be updated annually starting with the 1996 tax year in 1999. Statistics Canada manages the database on behalf of a federal-provincial consortium led by Citizenship and Immigration Canada. The IMDB was created specifically to respond to the need for detailed and reliable data on the performance and impact of immigration policies and programs. It is the only source of data at Statistics Canada that provides a direct link between immigration policy levers and the economic performance of immigrants. The paper will examine the issues related to the development of a longitudinal database combining administrative records to support policy-relevant research and analysis. Discussion will focus specifically on the methodological, conceptual, analytical and privacy issues involved in the creation and ongoing development of this database. The paper will also touch briefly on research findings, which illustrate the policy outcome links the IMDB allows policy-makers to investigate.

Description:

As the availability of both health utilization and outcome information becomes increasingly important to health care researchers and policy makers, the ability to link person-specific health data becomes a critical objective. This type of linkage of population-based administrative health databases has been realized in British Columbia. The database was created by constructing an historical file of all persons registered with the health care system, and then by probabilistically linking various program files to this 'coordinating' file. The first phase of development included the linkage of hospital discharge data, physician billing data, continuing care data, data about drug costs for the elderly, births data and deaths data. The second phase of development has seen the addition data sources external to the Ministry of Health including cancer incidence data, workers' compensation data, and income assistance data.

Description:

Following the problems with estimating underenumeration in the 1991 Census of England and Wales the aim for the 2001 Census is to create a database that is fully adjusted to net underenumeration. To achieve this, the paper investigates weighted donor imputation methodology that utilises information from both the census and census coverage survey (CCS). The US Census Bureau has considered a similar approach for their 2000 Census (see Isaki et al 1998). The proposed procedure distinguishes between individuals who are not counted by the census because their household is missed and those who are missed in counted households. Census data is linked to data from the CCS. Multinomial logistic regression is used to estimate the probabilities that households are missed by the census and the probabilities that individuals are missed in counted households. Household and individual coverage weights are constructed from the estimated probabilities and these feed into the donor imputation procedure.

Description:

The geographical and temporal relationship between outdoor air pollution and asthma was examined by linking together data from multiple sources. These included the administrative records of 59 general practices widely dispersed across England and Wales for half a million patients and all their consultations for asthma, supplemented by a socio-economic interview survey. Postcode enabled linkage with: (i) computed local road density; (ii) emission estimates of sulphur dioxide and nitrogen dioxides, (iii) measured/interpolated concentration of black smoke, sulphur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide and other pollutants at practice level. Parallel Poisson time series analysis took into account between-practice variations to examine daily correlations in practices close to air quality monitoring stations. Preliminary analyses show small and generally non-significant geographical associations between consultation rates and pollution markers. The methodological issues relevant to combining such data, and the interpretation of these results will be discussed.

Description:

Electricity rates that vary by time-of-day have the potential to significantly increase economic efficiency in the energy market. A number of utilities have undertaken economic studies of time-of-use rates schemes for their residential customers. This paper uses meta-analysis to examine the impact of time-of-use rates on electricity demand pooling the results of thirty-eight separate programs. There are four key findings. First, very large peak to off-peak price ratios are needed to significantly affect peak demand. Second, summer peak rates are relatively effective compared to winter peak rates. Third, permanent time-or-use rates are relatively effective compared to experimental ones. Fourth, demand charges rival ordinary time-of-use rates in terms of impact.

Description:

We use data on 14 populations of coho salmon to estimate critical parameters that are vital for management of fish populations. Parameter estimates from individual data sets are inefficient and can be highly biased, and we investigate methods to overcome these problems. Combination of data sets using nonlinear mixed effects models provides more useful results, however questions of influence and robustness are raised. For comparison, robust estimates are obtained. Model-robustness is also explored using a family of alternative functional forms. Our results allow ready calculation of the limits of exploitation and may help to prevent extinction of fish stocks. Similar methods can be applied in other contexts where parameter estimation is part of a larger decision-making process.

Description:

This report deals with sampling and weighting, a process whereby certain characteristics are collected and processed for a random sample of dwellings and persons identified in the complete census enumeration. Data for the whole population are then obtained by scaling up the results for the sample to the full population level. The use of sampling may lead to substantial reductions in costs and respondent burden, or alternatively, can allow the scope of a census to be broadened at the same cost.