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Description: Estimation at fine levels of aggregation is necessary to better describe society. Small area estimation model-based approaches that combine sparse survey data with rich data from auxiliary sources have been proven useful to improve the reliability of estimates for small domains. Considered here is a scenario where small area model-based estimates, produced at a given aggregation level, needed to be disaggregated to better describe the social structure at finer levels. For this scenario, an allocation method was developed to implement the disaggregation, overcoming challenges associated with data availability and model development at such fine levels. The method is applied to adult literacy and numeracy estimation at the county-by-group-level, using data from the U.S. Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies. In this application the groups are defined in terms of age or education, but the method could be applied to estimation of other equity-deserving groups.

Description: In accordance with Statistics Canada’s long-term Disaggregated Data Action Plan (DDAP), several initiatives have been implemented into the Labour Force Survey (LFS). One of the more direct initiatives was a targeted increase in the size of the monthly LFS sample. Furthermore, a regular Supplement program was introduced, where an additional series of questions are asked to a subset of LFS respondents and analyzed in a monthly or quarterly production cycle. Finally, the production of modelled estimates based on Small Area Estimation (SAE) methodologies resumed for the LFS and will include a wider scope with more analytical value than what had existed in the past. This paper will give an overview of these three initiatives.

Description: Sampling variance smoothing is an important topic in small area estimation. In this paper, we propose sampling variance smoothing methods for small area proportion estimation. In particular, we consider the generalized variance function and design effect methods for sampling variance smoothing. We evaluate and compare the smoothed sampling variances and small area estimates based on the smoothed variance estimates through analysis of survey data from Statistics Canada. The results from real data analysis indicate that the proposed sampling variance smoothing methods work very well for small area estimation.

Description: We present design-based Horvitz-Thompson and multiplicity estimators of the population size, as well as of the total and mean of a response variable associated with the elements of a hidden population to be used with the link-tracing sampling variant proposed by Félix-Medina and Thompson (2004). Since the computation of the estimators requires to know the inclusion probabilities of the sampled people, but they are unknown, we propose a Bayesian model which allows us to estimate them, and consequently to compute the estimators of the population parameters. The results of a small numeric study indicate that the performance of the proposed estimators is acceptable.

Description: The Longitudinal Social Data Development Program (LSDDP) is a social data integration approach aimed at providing longitudinal analytical opportunities without imposing additional burden on respondents. The LSDDP uses a multitude of signals from different data sources for the same individual, which helps to better understand their interactions and track changes over time. This article looks at how the ethnicity status of people in Canada can be estimated at the most detailed disaggregated level possible using the results from a variety of business rules applied to linked data and to the LSDDP denominator. It will then show how improvements were obtained using machine learning methods, such as decision trees and random forest techniques.

Description: The validity of survival estimates from cancer registry data depends, in part, on the identification of the deaths of deceased cancer patients. People whose deaths are missed seemingly live on forever and are informally referred to as “immortals”, and their presence in registry data can result in inflated survival estimates. This study assesses the issue of immortals in the Canadian Cancer Registry (CCR) using a recently proposed method that compares the survival of long-term survivors of cancers for which “statistical” cure has been reported with that of similar people from the general population.

Description:

This report describes sampling, weighting and estimation procedures used in the Census of Population. It provides operational and theoretical justifications for them, and presents the results of the evaluations of these procedures.

Description: Microdata files are unique among census products in that they give users access to unaggregated data. This makes the public use microdata files (PUMFs) powerful research tools. Each file contains anonymous individual responses on a large number of variables. The PUMF user can group and manipulate these variables to suit his/her own data and research requirements. Tabulations not included in other census products can be created or relationships between variables can be analysed by using different statistical tests. PUMFs provide quick access to a comprehensive social and economic database about Canada and its people. All subject-matter covered by the census is included in the microdata files. However, to ensure the anonymity of the respondents, geographic identifiers have been restricted to the provinces/territories and large metropolitan areas. Microdata files have traditionally been disseminated on magnetic tape, which required access to a mainframe computer. For the first time, the 1991 PUMFs will also be available on CD-ROM for microcomputer applications. This file contains data based on a 3% of the population enumerated in the 1991 Census. It provides information on the demographic, social and economic characteristics of the Canadian population. The Individual File allows users to return to the base unit of the census, enabling them to group and manipulate the data to suit their own data and research requirements.

This product provides two basic tools to assist users in accessing and using the 1991 Census Public Use Microdata File - Individuals CD-ROM.

Description: Microdata files are unique among census products in that they give users access to unaggregated data. This makes the public use microdata files (PUMFs) powerful research tools. Each file contains anonymous individual responses on a large number of variables. The PUMF user can group and manipulate these variables to suit his/her own data and research requirements. Tabulations not included in other census products can be created or relationships between variables can be analysed by using different statistical tests. PUMFs provide quick access to a comprehensive social and economic database about Canada and its people. All subject-matter covered by the census is included in the microdata files. However, to ensure the anonymity of the respondents, geographic identifiers have been restricted to the provinces/territories and large metropolitan areas. Microdata files have traditionally been disseminated on magnetic tape, which required access to a mainframe computer. For the first time, the 1991 PUMFs will also be available on CD-ROM for microcomputer applications. This file contains data based on a 3% of the population enumerated in the 1991 Census. It provides information on the demographic, social and economic characteristics of the Canadian population. The Households and Housing File allows users to return to the base unit of the census, enabling them to group and manipulate the data to suit their own data and research requirements.

This product provides two basic tools to assist users in accessing and using the 1991 Census Public Use Microdata File - Households and Housing CD-ROM.

Description: This report explores four potential methods of estimating the number of girls and women currently living in Canada who are considered at risk for female genital mutilation or cutting (FGM/C) based on their (and their parents’) country of birth. In this report, “at risk for FGM/C” broadly means at risk of having experienced FGM/C or of experiencing it in the future.

Description: Microdata files are unique among census products in that they give users access to unaggregated data. This makes the public use microdata files (PUMFs) powerful research tools. Each file contains anonymous individual responses on a large number of variables. The PUMF user can group and manipulate these variables to suit his/her own data and research requirements. Tabulations not included in other census products can be created or relationships between variables can be analysed by using different statistical tests. PUMFs provide quick access to a comprehensive social and economic database about Canada and its people. All subject-matter covered by the census is included in the microdata files. However, to ensure the anonymity of the respondents, geographic identifiers have been restricted to the provinces/territories and large metropolitan areas. Microdata files have traditionally been disseminated on magnetic tape, which required access to a mainframe computer. For the first time, the 1991 PUMFs will also be available on CD-ROM for microcomputer applications. This file contains data based on a 3% of the population enumerated in the 1991 Census. It provides information on the demographic, social and economic characteristics of the Canadian population. The Individual File allows users to return to the base unit of the census, enabling them to group and manipulate the data to suit their own data and research requirements.

This product provides two basic tools to assist users in accessing and using the 1991 Census Public Use Microdata File - Individuals CD-ROM.

Description: Microdata files are unique among census products in that they give users access to unaggregated data. This makes the public use microdata files (PUMFs) powerful research tools. Each file contains anonymous individual responses on a large number of variables. The PUMF user can group and manipulate these variables to suit his/her own data and research requirements. Tabulations not included in other census products can be created or relationships between variables can be analysed by using different statistical tests. PUMFs provide quick access to a comprehensive social and economic database about Canada and its people. All subject-matter covered by the census is included in the microdata files. However, to ensure the anonymity of the respondents, geographic identifiers have been restricted to the provinces/territories and large metropolitan areas. Microdata files have traditionally been disseminated on magnetic tape, which required access to a mainframe computer. For the first time, the 1991 PUMFs will also be available on CD-ROM for microcomputer applications. This file contains data based on a 3% of the population enumerated in the 1991 Census. It provides information on the demographic, social and economic characteristics of the Canadian population. The Households and Housing File allows users to return to the base unit of the census, enabling them to group and manipulate the data to suit their own data and research requirements.

This product provides two basic tools to assist users in accessing and using the 1991 Census Public Use Microdata File - Households and Housing CD-ROM.

Description: The Canadian Tobacco, Alcohol and Drugs Survey (CTADS) is a biennial general population survey of tobacco, alcohol and drug use among Canadians aged 15 years and older, with the primary focus on 15- to 24-year-olds. The CTADS is a telephone survey conducted by Statistics Canada on behalf of Health Canada.

Description:

The public use microdata file from the 2010 Canada Survey of Giving, Volunteering and Participating is now available. This file contains information collected from nearly 15,000 respondents aged 15 and over residing in private households in the provinces.The public use microdata file provides provincial-level information about the ways in which Canadians donate money and in-kind gifts to charitable and nonprofit organizations; volunteer their time to these organizations; provide help directly to others. Socio-demographic, income and labour force data are also included on the file.

Description:

This package was designed to enable users to access and manipulate the microdata file for Cycle 22 (2008) of the General Social Survey (GSS). It contains information on the objectives, methodology and estimation procedures, as well as guidelines for releasing estimates based on the survey. Cycle 22 collected data from persons 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. The survey covered a range of topics such as social networks, and social and civic participation. Information was also collected on major changes in respondents' lives in the last 12 months, the resources they used during these transitions and unmet needs for help. Questions were also asked on trust, sense of belonging, volunteering and unpaid work.

Description:

The Participation and Activity Limitation Survey (PALS) is a post-censal survey of adults with disabilities, including any person whose everyday activities are limited because of a physical condition or health problem.

The survey covers themes such as activity limitations, help with everyday activities, education, employment status, social participation and economic characteristics.

Description:

This package was designed to enable users to access and manipulate the microdata file for the 21st cycle (2007) of the General Social Survey (GSS). It contains information on the objectives, methodology and estimation procedures, as well as guidelines for releasing estimates based on the survey. Cycle 21 of the GSS collected data from persons aged 45 years and over living in private households in the 10 provinces of Canada. The survey covered a wide range of topics such as well-being, family composition, retirement decisions and plans, care giving and care receiving experiences, social networks and housing.

Description:

The Aboriginal Peoples Survey (APS) provides data on the social and economic conditions of Aboriginal people in Canada. Its specific purpose was to identify the needs of Aboriginal people focusing on issues such as health, schooling and language. The survey was designed and implemented in partnership with national Aboriginal organizations.

This product contains information for the Aboriginal child and youth population (under 15 years) living in off-reserve areas.

Description:

Cycle 16 of the GSS is the second cycle (after cycle 11) to collect information social support for older Canadians, introducing modules on preparations for retirement and retirement experience. The GSS is an annual telephone survey covering the non-institutionalized population in the 10 provinces. Respondents were randomly selected from a list of individuals aged 45 and over who had responded to another Statistics Canada survey. Data were collected over an 11-month period from February to December 2002. The representative sample had about 25,000 respondents. The response rate was almost 84%.

The main objective of the 2002 GSS was to provide data on the aging population. However, the survey allows detailed analysis of characteristics of family and friends who provide care to seniors; characteristics of seniors receiving formal and informal care; links to broader determinants of health (such as income, education and social networks); and people's retirement plans and experiences.

Description:

Topics covered include social contact with friends and relatives, unpaid help given and received, volunteering and charitable giving, civic engagement, political engagement, religious participation, trust and reciprocity. Cycle 17 of the General Social Survey is the first cycle to collect detailed information on social engagement in Canada.

The target population for Cycle 17 is all persons 15 years of age and older in Canada, excluding residents of the Yukon, Northwest Territories and Nunavut, and full-time residents of institutions.

Description: Estimation at fine levels of aggregation is necessary to better describe society. Small area estimation model-based approaches that combine sparse survey data with rich data from auxiliary sources have been proven useful to improve the reliability of estimates for small domains. Considered here is a scenario where small area model-based estimates, produced at a given aggregation level, needed to be disaggregated to better describe the social structure at finer levels. For this scenario, an allocation method was developed to implement the disaggregation, overcoming challenges associated with data availability and model development at such fine levels. The method is applied to adult literacy and numeracy estimation at the county-by-group-level, using data from the U.S. Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies. In this application the groups are defined in terms of age or education, but the method could be applied to estimation of other equity-deserving groups.

Description: In accordance with Statistics Canada’s long-term Disaggregated Data Action Plan (DDAP), several initiatives have been implemented into the Labour Force Survey (LFS). One of the more direct initiatives was a targeted increase in the size of the monthly LFS sample. Furthermore, a regular Supplement program was introduced, where an additional series of questions are asked to a subset of LFS respondents and analyzed in a monthly or quarterly production cycle. Finally, the production of modelled estimates based on Small Area Estimation (SAE) methodologies resumed for the LFS and will include a wider scope with more analytical value than what had existed in the past. This paper will give an overview of these three initiatives.

Description: Sampling variance smoothing is an important topic in small area estimation. In this paper, we propose sampling variance smoothing methods for small area proportion estimation. In particular, we consider the generalized variance function and design effect methods for sampling variance smoothing. We evaluate and compare the smoothed sampling variances and small area estimates based on the smoothed variance estimates through analysis of survey data from Statistics Canada. The results from real data analysis indicate that the proposed sampling variance smoothing methods work very well for small area estimation.

Description: We present design-based Horvitz-Thompson and multiplicity estimators of the population size, as well as of the total and mean of a response variable associated with the elements of a hidden population to be used with the link-tracing sampling variant proposed by Félix-Medina and Thompson (2004). Since the computation of the estimators requires to know the inclusion probabilities of the sampled people, but they are unknown, we propose a Bayesian model which allows us to estimate them, and consequently to compute the estimators of the population parameters. The results of a small numeric study indicate that the performance of the proposed estimators is acceptable.

Description: The Longitudinal Social Data Development Program (LSDDP) is a social data integration approach aimed at providing longitudinal analytical opportunities without imposing additional burden on respondents. The LSDDP uses a multitude of signals from different data sources for the same individual, which helps to better understand their interactions and track changes over time. This article looks at how the ethnicity status of people in Canada can be estimated at the most detailed disaggregated level possible using the results from a variety of business rules applied to linked data and to the LSDDP denominator. It will then show how improvements were obtained using machine learning methods, such as decision trees and random forest techniques.

Description: The validity of survival estimates from cancer registry data depends, in part, on the identification of the deaths of deceased cancer patients. People whose deaths are missed seemingly live on forever and are informally referred to as “immortals”, and their presence in registry data can result in inflated survival estimates. This study assesses the issue of immortals in the Canadian Cancer Registry (CCR) using a recently proposed method that compares the survival of long-term survivors of cancers for which “statistical” cure has been reported with that of similar people from the general population.

Description: This report explores four potential methods of estimating the number of girls and women currently living in Canada who are considered at risk for female genital mutilation or cutting (FGM/C) based on their (and their parents’) country of birth. In this report, “at risk for FGM/C” broadly means at risk of having experienced FGM/C or of experiencing it in the future.

Description: The Canadian Income Survey (CIS) has introduced improvements to the methods and systems used to produce income estimates with the release of its 2021 reference year estimates. This paper describes the changes and presents the approximate net result of these changes on income estimates using data for 2019 and 2020. The changes described in this paper highlight the ways in which data quality has been improved while producing minimal impact on key CIS estimates and trends.

Description:

This technical paper describes how the cost for "other necessities" is estimated in the 2018-base MBM. It provides a brief overview of the theory and application of techniques for estimating costs of "other necessities" in poverty lines and deconstructs the 2018-base MBM other necessities component to provide insights on how it is constructed. The aim of this paper is to provide a more detailed understanding of how the other necessities component of the MBM is estimated.

Description:

This document briefly describes the assumptions and scenarios that were selected for the population projections for Canada and its regions on the themes of immigration and diversity for the period 2016 to 2041, produced using the Demosim microsimulation projection model.

Description:

This report describes sampling and weighting procedures used in the 2006 Census. It reviews the history of these procedures in Canadian censuses, provides operational and theoretical justifications for them, and presents the results of the evaluation studies of these procedures.

Description:

In 2008, Statistics Canada conducted the first Agricultural Water Use Survey. This pilot survey is part of the Canadian Environment Sustainability Indicators initiative and collects information on volumes of water used for irrigation, irrigated areas, irrigation practices and the quality of water used for agricultural purposes. This technical paper describes the methodology used for the pilot survey and includes recommendations for future cycles of the survey. The validation process seems to indicate that the method used to estimate the volumes of water used and the irrigated areas calculated underestimates the results. The report gives recommendations to minimize this bias in the next iterations of the survey. First, it is recommended to simplify the level of information collected by the survey; to review the sampling methodology; and to examine other means of collecting information on volumes of water used for irrigation. This pilot version of the survey remains a reliable source for consistent data on agricultural water use.

Description:

This paper examines the various products associated with the quarterly labour productivity program. It outlines the nature of the volatility in the very short-run estimates and examines properties of the revisions made to the estimates of Canadian labour productivity and its components (gross domestic product and hours worked) since the inception of the program in 2001.

Description:

This paper examines the effects of alternative specifications of the user costs of capital on the estimated price and volume indices of capital services. It asks how sensitive the results are to the use of exogenous versus endogenous rates of return, to alternate ways of including capital gains, and to whether corrections are made for tax rates. The paper also examines the effect of the various user cost formulae on the measured multifactor productivity growth.

Description:

This paper generates depreciation profiles for a diverse set of assets based on patterns of resale prices and retirements. In doing so, it explores the sensitivity of estimates of the growth in capital stock and capital services to alternate estimates of depreciation.

In the first instance, survival analysis techniques are used to estimate changes in valuation of assets over the course of their service life. In the second instance, a two-step procedure is utilized that first estimates the discard function for used assets (assets discarded at zero prices) and then uses the resulting estimates to correct for selection bias that arises when just positive used-asset prices are employed to estimate age-price profiles to produce depreciation rates. For the third method, a discard function and an asset efficiency function are jointly specified and estimated.

These three different methods produce depreciation profiles that follow convex patterns. Accelerated profiles are apparent for many individual assets in the machinery and equipment and structures classes.

We also compare the ex post estimates of length of life that are based on outcomes to ex ante expected lives and find they are much the same. We therefore choose ex ante lives along with information from the ex post rates on the rate of decline in an asset's value to generate a set of depreciation rates for use in the productivity accounts.

We then use our depreciation model to produce estimates of the growth in capital stock and capital services over the 1961 to 1996 period. We find that the resulting estimates of capital stock and capital services are quite similar to those previously produced.

Description:

This paper introduces and explains modifications made to the Labour Force Survey estimates in January 2006. Some of these modifications include changes to the population estimates, improvements to the public and private sector estimates and historical updates to several small Census Agglomerations (CA).

Description:

The Food Expenditure Survey (FES) is a periodic survey collecting data from households on food spending habits. Data are collected mainly using weekly diaries of purchases that the respondents must fill in daily during two consecutive weeks.

This paper presents a detailed description of the methodology of this survey. First, we briefly described the sample design which is mainly based on the plan of the Labour Force Survey. Then we present the methods of collection, data processing, weighting, and variance estimation, as well as the suppression of unreliable data in the tables of estimates.

Description:

This paper discusses the productivity program at Statistics Canada, covering topics such as international efforts to provide more comparable statistics, attempts to expand our knowledge of the factors behind productivity growth, and challenges facing the program.

Description:

These two programs are designed to estimate variability due to measurement error beyond the sampling variance introduced by the survey design in the Youth in Transition Survey / Programme of International Student Assessment (YITS/PISA). Program code is included in an appendix.

Description:

This guide will be of assistance in understanding the concepts, methodology and data quality of the surveys conducted as well as the data analysed by the Pensions and Wealth Surveys Section of the Income Statistics Division. It covers the following surveys/programs:- Pension Plans in Canada;- Trusteed Pension Funds (Census and Quarterly);- Survey of Financial Security; and- Pension adjustment/registered retirement savings plans data file provided by Canada Customs and Revenue Agency.