Analysis

Description:

An aspect of surveys not always given adequate consideration is maintenance.

The scope and importance of survey maintenance are discussed and a case is made for a more scientific methodological approach. Practical applications to various stages of surveys are illustrated by examples from the Canadian Labour Force Survey.

Description:

In surveys a response may be incomplete or some items may be inconsistent or, as in the case of two-phase sampling, items may be unavailable. In these cases it may be expedient to impute values for the missing items. While imputation is not a particularly good solution to any specific estimation problem, it does permit the production of arbitrary estimates in a consistent way.

The survey statistician may have to cope with a mixture of numerical and categorical items, subject to a variety of constraints. He should evaluate his technique, especially with respect to bias. He should make sure that imputed items are clearly identified and summary reports produced.

A variety of imputation techniques in current use is described and discussed, with particular reference to the practical problems involved.

Description:

A FORTRAN Subroutine to obtain the “working probabilities” for Fellegi’s (1963) method of unequal probability sampling is given. The solution is obtained by an iterative procedure where the starting values for the (k+l)th draw “working probabilities” are the solutions for the kth draw “working probabilities” and the iterative procedure is terminated when a prespecified accuracy is achieved. The limitation is that the Subroutine can only be used to obtain up to and including the 5th draw “working probabilities”. It was observed that the convergence occurs very fast in double precision. Therefore all real variables have been declared as double precision. The joint selection probabilities \Pi_{ij}’s i.e. the probability that both the ith and jth units are in the sample are obtained by summing the probabilities of selecting those samples that contain both the ith and jth units. The joint selection probabilities are required for the variance estimation of the Horvitz-Thompson estimator of population total of the characteristic of interest.

Description:

Survey organizations undertake periodic redesigns of continuous surveys. Reasons for such redesigns related to changes in information needs to be satisfied by the survey and changes in public awareness and attitudes towards surveys are discussed in the context of the redesign of the Canadian Labour Force Survey following the 1981 Census. In particular, the importance of close dialogue between users of the survey data and design statisticians at the early stages of the redesign process in order to establish survey objectives is stressed.

Description:

The Department of Supply and Services’ role and procedures are outlined as they relate to those using the services of the Department of Supply and Services and those receiving contracts.

There are two basic principles which cover all the policies and procedures. These are: i) the equality of opportunity to compete for Government contracts must be afforded to all qualified suppliers; and ii) that fair value for the taxpayers’ dollar must be obtained.

Description:

This paper discusses some of the changes in market research we should expect in the next decade. Currently, studies are issue oriented: they provide answers to specific questions or marketing issues. The next decade will see research projects with a broader scope: to understand how markets work and why consumers behave as they do. Measurements will be more complex, and multivariate analysis techniques will be used extensively to identify the subtle relationships within the data. Marketing models will be the conceptual framework for these more complex studies. Market analysis identifying consumer responsiveness segments provides a case example of what might be expected from model-based market research studies.

Description:

This paper identifies the stages in the life-cycle of government policies and programs. For each stage, examples are given of how survey research is presently used and likely trends over the next decade are identified.

Description:

This document describes the process of commissioning market research at Imperial Oil Limited. It outlines the management processes that precede commissioning and defines the expectations of a typical buyer of research work. It also examines the need to have a satisfactory business relationship between the buyer and the seller, and it provides a list of the attributes most often considered by a company seeking a supplier for a particular research project.

Description:

This paper provides a summary description of some of the characteristics of the proposals for new surveys submitted to Statistics Canada for review and consultation by other federal government departments. It describes which departments have been involved, gives details of the types of studies proposed and methodologies used, and deals briefly with some of the problems which the review process has uncovered.

Description:

This paper examines the effects of fertility, mortality and migration on the age profile of the Canadian population, particularly the effect of fluctuating fertility patterns which have occurred since the second World War. The author analyses the impact on social services and the economy as the shifting requirements of the “Baby Boom” cohorts move through their life cycle.

Description: Are you feeling like it's a little bit harder to bring home the bacon... from the grocery store? The latest data indicate that food prices have mostly stabilized... but why does it feel like the cost of feeding your family is still going up? Today, we're talking food inflation with StatCan's resident smart cookie Taylor Mitchell.

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 uses data from the 2018 and 2022 Canadian Internet Use Survey to examine patterns and trends in online banking by population groups.

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

Description: From January 2nd to February 5th, 2024, Statistics Canada conducted the Canadian Survey on Business Conditions. The purpose of this survey is to collect information on businesses in Canada related to emerging issues. This iteration of the survey focuses on business expectations and business conditions in Canada. In addition, the questionnaire for the first quarter of 2024 includes a component specifically for non-profit organizations (NPOs). The intent of this set of questions is to address a present data gap and to provide a better understanding of the non-profit sector. This infographic presents key results from this.

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: 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: 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: The papers published in the Analysis in Brief analytical series shed light on current economic issues. Aimed at a general audience, they cover a wide range of topics including National Accounts, business enterprises, trade, transportation, agriculture, the environment, manufacturing, science and technology, services, etc.

Description: Labour Statistics at a Glance features short analytical articles on specific topics of interest related to Canada's labour market. The studies examine recent or historical trends using data produced by the Centre for Labour Market Information, i.e., the Labour Force Survey, the Survey of Employment Payrolls and Hours, the Job Vacancy and Wage Survey, the Employment Insurance Coverage Survey and the Employment Insurance Statistics Program.

Description: The Health Research Working Paper Series publishes: analytical work-in-progress; background documentation for specific research projects (e.g methodological papers); lengthy reports intended for specific clients, and; compendiums of data tables. Publication in this series does not preclude publication of specific aspects of the work in a peer-reviewed journal.

Description: Environment fact sheets will include short, focused, single-theme analysis on key issues within the changing environment with regards to all Canadians. Over the course of the series, analysis will include topics on: air and climate, pollution and waste, environmental protection and quality, and natural resources.

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: 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: 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.

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: The Canadian Survey on Disability (CSD) is a national survey of Canadians aged 15 and over whose everyday activities are limited because of a long-term condition or health-related problem.

Description: The newsletter offers information aimed at three main groups, businesses (small to medium), communities and ethno-cultural groups/communities. Articles and outreach materials will assist their understanding of national and local data from the many relevant sources found on the Statistics Canada website.