Analysis

Description:

In the U.S. Census of Population and Housing, a sample of about one-in-six of the households receives a longer version of the census questionnaire called the long form. All others receive a version called the short form. Raking, using selected control totals from the short form, has been used to create two sets of weights for long form estimation; one for individuals and one for households. We describe a weight construction method based on quadratic programming that produces household weights such that the weighted sum for individual characteristics and for household characteristics agree closely with selected short form totals. The method is broadly applicable to situations where weights are to be constructed to meet both size bounds and sum-to-control restrictions. Application to the situation where the controls are estimates with an estimated covariance matrix is described.

Description:

The weighting cell estimator corrects for unit nonresponse by dividing the sample into homogeneous groups (cells) and applying a ratio correction to the respondents within each cell. Previous studies of the statistical properties of weighting cell estimators have assumed that these cells correspond to known population cells with homogeneous characteristics. In this article, we study the properties of the weighting cell estimator under a response probability model that does not require correct specification of homogeneous population cells. Instead, we assume that the response probabilities are a smooth but otherwise unspecified function of a known auxiliary variable. Under this more general model, we study the robustness of the weighting cell estimator against model misspecification. We show that, even when the population cells are unknown, the estimator is consistent with respect to the sampling design and the response model. We describe the effect of the number of weighting cells on the asymptotic properties of the estimator. Simulation experiments explore the finite sample properties of the estimator. We conclude with some guidance on how to select the size and number of cells for practical implementation of weighting cell estimation when those cells cannot be specified a priori.

Description:

When imputation is used to assign values for missing items in sample surveys, naïve methods of estimating the variances of survey estimates that treat the imputed values as if they were observed give biased variance estimates. This article addresses the problem of variance estimation for a linear estimator in which missing values are assigned by a single hot deck imputation (a form of imputation that is widely used in practice). We propose estimators of the variance of a linear hot deck imputed estimator using a decomposition of the total variance suggested by Särndal (1992). A conditional approach to variance estimation is developed that is applicable to both weighted and unweighted hot deck imputation. Estimation of the variance of a domain estimator is also examined.

Description:

One of the main objectives of a sample survey is the computation of estimates of means and totals for specific domains of interest. Domains are determined either before the survey is carried out (primary domains) or after it has been carried out (secondary domains). The reliability of the associated estimates depends on the variability of the sample size as well as on the y-variables of interest. This variability cannot be controlled in the absence of auxiliary information for subgroups of the population. However, if auxiliary information is available, the estimated reliability of the resulting estimates can be controlled to some extent. In this paper, we study the potential improvements in terms of the reliability of domain estimates that use auxiliary information. The properties (bias, coverage, efficiency) of various estimators that use auxiliary information are compared using a conditional approach.

Description:

This article studies the use of the sample distribution for the prediction of finite population totals under single-stage sampling. The proposed predictors employ the sample values of the target study variable, the sampling weights of the sample units and possibly known population values of auxiliary variables. The prediction problem is solved by estimating the expectation of the study values for units outside the sample as a function of the corresponding expectation under the sample distribution and the sampling weights. The prediction mean square error is estimated by a combination of an inverse sampling procedure and a re-sampling method. An interesting outcome of the present analysis is that several familiar estimators in common use are shown to be special cases of the proposed approach, thus providing them a new interpretation. The performance of the new and some old predictors in common use is evaluated and compared by a Monte Carlo simulation study using a real data set.

Description:

Multilevel models are often fitted to survey data gathered with a complex multistage sampling design. However, if such a design is informative, in the sense that the inclusion probabilities depend on the response variable even after conditioning on the covariates, then standard maximum likelihood estimators are biased. In this paper, following the Pseudo Maximum Likelihood (PML) approach of Skinner (1989), we propose a probability weighted estimation procedure for multilevel ordinal and binary models which eliminates the bias generated by the informativeness of the design. The reciprocals of the inclusion probabilities at each sampling stage are used to weight the log likelihood function and the weighted estimators obtained in this way are tested by means of a simulation study for the simple case of a binary random intercept model with and without covariates. The variance estimators are obtained by a bootstrap procedure. The maximization of the weighted log likelihood of the model is done by the NLMIXED procedure of the SAS, which is based on adaptive Gaussian quadrature. Also the bootstrap estimation of variances is implemented in the SAS environment.

Description:

The Canadian Labour Force Survey (LFS) was not designed to be a longitudinal survey. However, given that respondent households typically remain in the sample for six consecutive months, it is possible to reconstruct six-month fragments of longitudinal data from the monthly records of household members. Such longitudinal micro-data - altogether consisting of millions of person-months of individual and family level data - is useful for analyses of monthly labour market dynamics over relatively long periods of time, 25 years and more.

We make use of these data to estimate hazard functions describing transitions among the labour market states: self-employed, paid employee and not employed. Data on job tenure, for employed respondents, and on the date last worked, for those not employed - together with the date of survey responses - allow the construction of models that include terms reflecting seasonality and macro-economic cycles as well as the duration dependence of each type of transition. In addition, the LFS data permits spouse labour market activity and family composition variables to be included in the hazard models as time-varying covariates. The estimated hazard equations have been incorporated in the LifePaths microsimulation model. In that setting, the equations have been used to simulate lifetime employment activity from past, present and future birth cohorts. Simulation results have been validated by comparison with the age profiles of LFS employment/population ratios for the period 1976 to 2001.

Description:

Combining response data from the Belgian Fertility and Family Survey with individual level and municipality level data from the 1991 Census for both nonrespondents and respondents, multilevel logistic regression models for contact and cooperation propensity are estimated. The covariates introduced are a selection of indirect features, all out of the researchers' direct control. Contrary to previous research, Socio Economic Status is found to be positively related to cooperation. Another unexpected result is the absence of any considerable impact of ecological correlates such as urbanity.

Description:

In this Issue is a column where the Editor biefly presents each paper of the current issue of Survey Methodology. As well, it sometimes contain informations on structure or management changes in the journal.

Description:

This study examines variation among Canadian schools and provinces in their reading performance. It uses data from the 2000 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's (OECD).

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

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

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

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

Description: This infographic examines the early child care experiences of children with long-term conditions or disabilities using data from the 2023 Survey on Early Learning and Child Care arrangements – Children with Long-term Conditions and Disabilities (SELCCA – CLCD). It explores the types of extra support needed while in child care, the common difficulties they experienced as well as the impacts on the parent or guardian having difficulty finding a child care arrangement.

Description: Using data from the 2023 Survey on Early Learning and Child Care arrangements – Children with Long-term Conditions and Disabilities (SELCCA – CLCD), this American Sign Language video examines the early child care experiences of children with long-term conditions or disabilities.

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

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

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

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

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: Ethnic minorities are often underrepresented in survey research, due to the challenges many researchers face in including these populations. While some studies discuss several methods in comparison, few have directly compared these methods empirically, leaving researchers seeking to include ethnic minorities in their studies unsure of their best options. In this article, I briefly review the methodological and ethical reasons for increasing ethnic minority representation in social science research, as well as challenges of doing so. I then present findings from ten studies which empirically compare methods of sampling and/or recruiting ethnic minority individuals. Finally, I discuss some implications for future research.

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: To overcome the traditional drawbacks of chain sampling methods, the sampling method called “network sampling with memory” was developed. Its unique feature is to recreate, gradually in the field, a frame for the target population composed of individuals identified by respondents and to randomly draw future respondents from this frame, thereby minimizing selection bias. Tested for the first time in France between September 2020 and June 2021, for a survey among Chinese immigrants in Île-de-France (ChIPRe), this presentation describes the difficulties encountered during collection—sometimes contextual, due to the pandemic, but mostly inherent to the method.

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: Economic and Social Reports includes in-depth research, brief analyses, and current economic updates on a variety of topics, such as labour, immigration, education and skills, income mobility, well-being, aging, firm dynamics, productivity, economic transitions, and economic geography. All the papers are institutionally reviewed and the research and analytical papers undergo peer review to ensure that they conform to Statistics Canada's mandate as a governmental statistical agency and adhere to generally accepted standards of good professional practice.

Description: Every year, Statistics Canada collects data from hundreds of surveys. As the amount of data gathered increases, Statistics Canada has introduced infographics to help people, business owners, academics, and management at all levels, understand key information derived from the data. Infographics can be used to quickly communicate a message, to simplify the presentation of large amounts of data, to see data patterns and relationships, and to monitor changes in variables over time.

These infographics will provide a quick overview of Statistics Canada survey data.

Description: Statistics Canada produces videos that present key communications messages to multiple publics in an easy-to-understand way. As a communications tool, they make complex information and ideas easy to interpret by telling a visual story. Statistics Canada has videos on a variety of topics.

Description: Reports on Special Business Projects is an occasional series that focuses primarily on the results of special surveys or special projects conducted by the Centre for Special Business Projects. The reports cover a wide range of topics, which include business performance and trends, custom tabulations of business data, economic impact studies, new measurement frameworks and indicators to support program development, monitoring and performance assessment, territorial economic indicators and other special studies.

Description:

Health Reports, published by the Health Analysis Division of Statistics Canada, is a peer-reviewed journal of population health and health services research. It is designed for a broad audience that includes health professionals, researchers, policymakers, and the general public. The journal publishes articles of wide interest that contain original and timely analyses of national or provincial/territorial surveys or administrative databases. New articles are published electronically each month.

Health Reports had an impact factor of 5.0 for 2022 and a five-year impact factor of 5.6. All articles are indexed in PubMed. Our online catalogue is free and receives more than 700,000 visits per year. External submissions are welcome.

Description: Statistics Canada regularly prepares presentations with statistical findings about the country’s economy, society and environment. These presentations may be intended for conferences, meetings with stakeholders, or other events held throughout the year to provide Statistics Canada with an opportunity to promote the role of official statistics and to better understand data users’ needs. This series provides online access to these presentations as well as new presentations created to help communicate research findings on a wide range of subjects to a broad audience.

Description: The ‘Eh Sayers’ podcast explores data of interest to Canadians, like social or news-worthy topics. It also aims to foster data literacy and deliver insight into the lives of Canadians by exploring the data the agency produces and tying it to real life situations through storytelling.

Description: This publication provides in-depth analysis and detailed statistics on a variety of topics and issues related to justice and public safety. Topics include crime, victimization, homicide, civil, family and criminal courts, and correctional services. Issues related to community safety, and perceptions of safety are also covered. The publication is intended for those with an interest in Canada's justice and public safety systems as well as those who plan, establish, administer and evaluate programs and projects related to justice and public safety.

Description: The Analytical Studies Branch Research Paper Series provides for the circulation of research conducted by Analytical Studies Branch staff and collaborators. The Series is intended to stimulate discussion on a variety of topics, such as labour, immigration, education and skills, income mobility, well-being, aging, firm dynamics, productivity, economic transitions, and economic geography. Readers of the Series are encouraged to contact the authors with their comments and suggestions. All the papers in the Analytical Studies Branch Research Paper Series go through institutional and peer review to ensure that they conform to Statistics Canada's mandate as a governmental statistical agency and adhere to generally accepted standards of good professional practice.

Description: This publication presents key highlights and results from the General Social Survey on the topics of caregiving and care receiving; social identity; giving, volunteering and participating; victimization; time use; and family.