Analysis

Description: This paper includes a description of interviewer techniques and procedures used to minimize non-response, an outline of methods used to monitor and control non-response, and a discussion of how non-respondents are treated in the data processing and estimation stages of the Canadian Labour Force Survey. Recent non-response rates as well as data on the characteristics of non-respondents are also given. It is concluded that a yearly non-response rate of approximately 5 percent is probably the best that can be achieved in the Labour Force Survey.

Description: Two methods for estimating the correlated response variance of a survey estimator are studied by way of both theoretical comparison and empirical investigation. The variance of these estimators is discussed and the effects of outliers examined. Finally, an improved estimator is developed and evaluated.

Description: Let U = {1, 2, …, i, …, N} be a finite population of N identifiable units. A known “size measure” x_i is associated with unit i; i = 1, 2, ..., N. A sampling procedure for selecting a sample of size n (2 < n < N) with probability proportional to size (PPS) and without replacement (WOR) from the population is proposed. With this method, the inclusion probability is proportional to size (IPPS) for each unit in the population.

Description: Approximate cutoff rules for stratifying a population into a take-all and take-some universe have been given by Dalenius (1950) and Glasser (1962). They expressed the cutoff value (that value which delineates the boundary of the take-all and take-some) as a function of the mean, the sampling weight and the population variance. Their cutoff values were derived on the assumption that a single random sample of size n was to be drawn without replacement from the population of size N.

In the present context, exact and approximate cutoff rules have been worked out for a similar situation. Rather than providing the sample size of the sample, the precision (coefficient of variation) is given. Note that in many sampling situations, the sampler is given a set of objectives in terms of reliability and not sample size. The result is particularly useful for determining the take-all - take-some boundary for samples drawn from a known population. The procedure is also extended to ratio estimation.

Description: Under a sequential sampling plan, the proportion defective in the sample is generally a biased estimator of the population value. In this paper, an unbiased estimator is given. Also, an unbiased estimator of its variance is derived. These results are applied to an estimation problem from the 1976 Canadian Census.

Description: I.P. Fellegi and D. Holt proposed a systematic approach to automatic edit and imputation. An implementation of this proposal was a Generalized Edit and Imputation System by the Hot-Deck Approach, that was utilized in the edit and imputation of the 1976 Canadian Census of Population and Housing. This paper discusses that application, evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of the methodology with some empirical evidence. The system will be considered in relation to the general issues of the edit and imputation of survey data. Some directions for future developments will also be considered.

Description: Owners of small businesses complain about the quantity of forms they are required to collectors of statistics. Administrative data are an alternative source but do not usually include all the information required by the survey takers.

The “Tax Data Imputation System” makes use of tax data collected from a large number of businesses by Revenue Canada and data obtained by sample survey for a small subset of these businesses. Survey data is imputed (estimated) for all the businesses not actually surveyed using a “hot-deck” technique, with adjustments made to ensure certain edit rules are satisfied. The results of a simulation study suggest that this procedure has reasonable statistical properties. Estimators (of means or totals) are unbiased with variances of comparable size to the corresponding ratio estimators.

Description: Frames designed for continuous surveys are sometimes used for ad hoc surveys which require selection of sampling units separate from those selected for the continuous survey. This paper presents an unbiased extension of Keyfitz’s (1951) sample updating method to the case where a portion of the frame has been reserved for surveys other than the main continuous survey. A simple although biased alternative is presented.

The scope under Platek and Singh’s (1975) design strategy for an area based continuous survey requiring updating is then expanded to encompass rotation of first stage units, establishment of a separate special survey sub-frame, and procedures to prevent re-selection of ultimate sampling units.

The methods are evaluated in a Monte Carlo study using Census data to simulate the design for the Canadian Labour Force Survey.

Description: Some estimators alternative to the usual PPS estimator are suggested in this paper for situations where the size measure used for PPS sampling is not correlated with the study variable and where data are available on another supplementary variable (size measure). Properties of these estimators are studied under super-population models and also empirically.

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The problems of dealing with non-response at various stages of survey planning are discussed with implications for the mean square error, practicality and possible advantages and disadvantages. Conceptual issues of editing and imputation are also considered with regard to complexity and levels of imputation. The methods of imputation include weighting, duplication, and substitution of historical records. The paper includes some methodology on the bias and variance.

Description: This short video explains how it can be very effective for all levels of governments and organizations that serve communities to use disaggregated data to make evidence-informed public policy decisions. By using disaggregated data, policymakers are able to design more appropriate and effective policies that meet the needs of each diverse and unique Canadian.

Description: This short video explains how the use of disaggregated data can help policymakers to develop more targeted and effective policies by identifying the unique needs and challenges faced by different demographic groups.

Description: Release published in The Daily – Statistics Canada’s official release bulletin

Description: This product presents data on the Sustainable Development Goals. They present an overview of the 17 Goals through infographics by leveraging data currently available to report on Canada’s progress towards the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

Description: Release published in The Daily – Statistics Canada’s official release bulletin

Description: This course is intended for Government of Canada employees who would like to learn about evaluating the quality of data for a particular use. Whether you are a new employee interested in learning the basics, or an experienced subject matter expert looking to refresh your skills, this course is here to help.

Description: This video explains the key concepts of different levels of aggregation of income data such as household and family income; income concepts derived from key income variables such as adjusted income and equivalence scale; and statistics used for income data such as median and average income, quartiles, quintiles, deciles and percentiles.

Description: This video builds on concepts introduced in the other videos on income. It explains key low-income concepts - Market Basket Measure (MBM), Low income measure (LIM) and Low-income cut-offs (LICO) and the indicators associated with these concepts such as the low-income gap and the low-income ratio. These concepts are used in analysis of the economic well-being of the population.

Description: Release published in The Daily – Statistics Canada’s official release bulletin

Description:

Gathering, exploring, analyzing and interpreting data are essential steps in producing information that benefits society, the economy and the environment. In this video, we will discuss the importance of considering data ethics throughout the process of producing statistical information.

As a pre-requisite to this video, make sure to watch the video titled “Data Ethics: An introduction” also available in Statistics Canada’s data literacy training catalogue.

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: The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) is committed to improving access to more microdata, while ensuring privacy and confidentiality is maintained, through its virtual DataLab which supports researchers to undertake complex research more efficiently. Currently, the DataLab research outputs need to follow strict rules to minimise disclosure risks for clearance. However, the clerical-review process is not cost effective and has potential to introduce errors. The increasing number of statistical outputs from different projects can potentially introduce differencing risks even though these outputs from different projects have met the strict output rules. The ABS has been exploring the possibility of providing automatic output checking using the ABS cellkey methodology to ensure that all outputs across different projects are protected consistently to minimise differencing risks and reduce costs associated with output checking.

Description: With the availability of larger and more diverse data sources, Statistical Institutes in Europe are inclined to publish statistics on smaller groups than they used to do. Moreover, high impact global events like the Covid crisis and the situation in Ukraine may also ask for statistics on specific subgroups of the population. Publishing on small, targeted groups not only raises questions on statistical quality of the figures, it also raises issues concerning statistical disclosure risk. The principle of statistical disclosure control does not depend on the size of the groups the statistics are based on. However, the risk of disclosure does depend on the group size: the smaller a group, the higher the risk. Traditional ways to deal with statistical disclosure control and small group sizes include suppressing information and coarsening categories. These methods essentially increase the (mean) group sizes. More recent approaches include perturbative methods that have the intention to keep the group sizes small in order to preserve as much information as possible while reducing the disclosure risk sufficiently. In this paper we will mention some European examples of special focus group statistics and discuss the implications on statistical disclosure control. Additionally, we will discuss some issues that the use of perturbative methods brings along: its impact on disclosure risk and utility as well as the challenges in proper communication thereof.

Description: The publication of more disaggregated data can increase transparency and provide important information on underrepresented groups. Developing more readily available access options increases the amount of information available to and produced by researchers. Increasing the breadth and depth of the information released allows for a better representation of the Canadian population, but also puts a greater responsibility on Statistics Canada to do this in a way that preserves confidentiality, and thus it is helpful to develop tools which allow Statistics Canada to quantify the risk from the additional data granularity. In an effort to evaluate the risk of a database reconstruction attack on Statistics Canada’s published Census data, this investigation follows the strategy of the US Census Bureau, who outlined a method to use a Boolean satisfiability (SAT) solver to reconstruct individual attributes of residents of a hypothetical US Census block, based just on a table of summary statistics. The technique is expanded to attempt to reconstruct a small fraction of Statistics Canada’s Census microdata. This paper will discuss the findings of the investigation, the challenges involved in mounting a reconstruction attack, and the effect of an existing confidentiality measure in mitigating these attacks. Furthermore, the existing strategy is compared to other potential methods used to protect data – in particular, releasing tabular data perturbed by some random mechanism, such as those suggested by differential privacy.

Description: Education and training is acknowledged as fundamental for the development of a society. It is a complex multidimensional phenomenon, which determinants are ascribable to several interrelated familiar and socio-economic conditions. To respond to the demand of supporting statistical information for policymaking and its monitoring and evaluation process, the Italian National Statistical Institute (Istat) is renewing the education and training statistical production system, implementing a new thematic statistical register. It will be part of the Istat Integrated System of Registers, thus allowing relating the education and training phenomenon to other relevant phenomena, e.g. transition to work.

Description: Growing Up in Québec is a longitudinal population survey that began in the spring of 2021 at the Institut de la statistique du Québec. Among the children targeted by this longitudinal follow-up, some will experience developmental difficulties at some point in their lives. Those same children often have characteristics associated with higher sample attrition (low-income family, parents with a low level of education). This article describes the two main challenges we encountered when trying to ensure sufficient representativeness of these children, in both the overall results and the subpopulation analyses.

Description: In 2021, Statistics Canada initiated the Disaggregated Data Action Plan, a multi-year initiative to support more representative data collection methods, enhance statistics on diverse populations to allow for intersectional analyses, and support government and societal efforts to address known inequalities and bring considerations of fairness and inclusion into decision making. As part of this initiative, we are building the Survey Series on People and their Communities, a new probabilistic panel specifically designed to collect data that can be disaggregated according to racialized group. This new tool will allow us to address data gaps and emerging questions related to diversity. This paper will give an overview of the design of the Survey Series on People and their Communities.

Description: At Statistics Netherlands (SN) for some economic sectors two partly-independent intra-annual turnover index series are available: a monthly series based on survey data and a quarterly series based on value added tax data for the smaller units and re-used survey data for the other units. SN aims to benchmark the monthly turnover index series to the quarterly census data on a quarterly basis. This cannot currently be done because the tax data has a different quarterly pattern: the turnover is relatively large in the fourth quarter of the year and smaller in the first quarter. With the current study we aim to describe this deviating quarterly pattern at micro level. In the past we developed a mixture model using absolute turnover levels that could explain part of the quarterly patterns. Because the absolute turnover levels differ between the two series, in the current study we use a model based on relative quarterly turnover levels within a year.

Description: Respondents to typical household surveys tend to significantly underreport their potential use of food aid distributed by associations. This underreporting is most likely related to the social stigma felt by people experiencing great financial difficulty. As a result, survey estimates of the number of recipients of that aid are much lower than the direct counts from the associations. Those counts tend to overestimate due to double counting. Through its adapted protocol, the Enquête Aide alimentaire (EAA) collected in late 2021 in France at a sample of sites of food aid distribution associations, controls the biases that affect the other sources and determines to what extent this aid is used.

Description: Since 1984, an annual international symposium on methodological issues has been sponsored by Statistics Canada. Proceedings have been available since 1987.

Description: The journal publishes articles dealing with various aspects of statistical development relevant to a statistical agency, such as design issues in the context of practical constraints, use of different data sources and collection techniques, total survey error, survey evaluation, research in survey methodology, time series analysis, seasonal adjustment, demographic studies, data integration, estimation and data analysis methods, and general survey systems development. The emphasis is placed on the development and evaluation of specific methodologies as applied to data collection or the data themselves.

Description: This series provides detailed documentation on income developments, including survey design issues, data quality evaluation and exploratory research.

Description: Papers in this series provide background discussions of the methods used to develop data for economic, health, and social analytical studies at Statistics Canada. They are intended to provide readers with information on the statistical methods, standards and definitions used to develop databases for research purposes. All papers in this series have undergone peer and institutional review to ensure that they conform to Statistics Canada's mandate and adhere to generally accepted standards of good professional practice.

Description: This report summarizes the annual achievements of the Methodology Research and Development Program (MRDP) sponsored by the Modern Statistical Methods and Data Science Branch at Statistics Canada. This program covers research and development activities in statistical methods with potentially broad application in the agency’s statistical programs; these activities would otherwise be less likely to be carried out during the provision of regular methodology services to those programs. The MRDP also includes activities that provide support in the application of past successful developments in order to promote the use of the results of research and development work. Selected prospective research activities are also presented.

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The Geography working paper series is intended to stimulate discussion on a variety of topics covering conceptual, methodological or technical work to support the development and dissemination of the division's data, products and services. Readers of the series are encouraged to contact the Geography Division with comments and suggestions.

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Historical works allow readers to peer into the past, not only to satisfy our curiosity about “the way things were,” but also to see how far we’ve come, and to learn from the past. For Statistics Canada, such works are also opportunities to commemorate the agency’s contributions to Canada and its people, and serve as a reminder that an institution such as this continues to evolve each and every day.

On the occasion of Statistics Canada’s 100th anniversary in 2018, Standing on the shoulders of giants: History of Statistics Canada: 1970 to 2008, builds on the work of two significant publications on the history of the agency, picking up the story in 1970 and carrying it through the next 36 years, until 2008. To that end, when enough time has passed to allow for sufficient objectivity, it will again be time to document the agency’s next chapter as it continues to tell Canada’s story in numbers.

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The Record Linkage Project Process Model (RLPPM) was developed by Statistics Canada to identify the processes and activities involved in record linkage. The RLPPM applies to linkage projects conducted at the individual and enterprise level using diverse data sources to create new data sources to meet analytical and operational needs.

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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.

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This publication is a catalogue of strategies and mechanisms that a statistical organization should consider adopting, according to its particular context. This compendium is based on lessons learned and best practices of leadership and management of statistical agencies within the scope of Statistics Canada’s International Statistical Fellowship Program (ISFP). It contains four broad sections including, characteristics of an effective national statistical system; core management practices; improving, modernizing and finding efficiencies; and, strategies to better inform and engage key stakeholders.