Analysis

Description:

The context of the discussion is the increasing incidence of international surveys, of which one is the International Tobacco Control (ITC) Policy Evaluation Project, which began in 2002. The ITC country surveys are longitudinal, and their aim is to evaluate the effects of policy measures being introduced in various countries under the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. The challenges of organization, data collection and analysis in international surveys are reviewed and illustrated. Analysis is an increasingly important part of the motivation for large scale cross-cultural surveys. The fundamental challenge for analysis is to discern the real response (or lack of response) to policy change, separating it from the effects of data collection mode, differential non-response, external events, time-in-sample, culture, and language. Two problems relevant to statistical analysis are discussed. The first problem is the question of when and how to analyze pooled data from several countries, in order to strengthen conclusions which might be generally valid. While in some cases this seems to be straightforward, there are differing opinions on the extent to which pooling is possible and reasonable. It is suggested that for formal comparisons, random effects models are of conceptual use. The second problem is to find models of measurement across cultures and data collection modes which will enable calibration of continuous, binary and ordinal responses, and produce comparisons from which extraneous effects have been removed. It is noted that hierarchical models provide a natural way of relaxing requirements of model invariance across groups.

Description:

Dependent interviewing (DI) is used in many longitudinal surveys to "feed forward" data from one wave to the next. Though it is a promising technique which has been demonstrated to enhance data quality in certain respects, relatively little is known about how it is actually administered in the field. This research seeks to address this issue through behavior coding. Various styles of DI were employed in the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA) in January, 2006, and recordings were made of pilot field interviews. These recordings were analysed to determine whether the questions (particularly the DI aspects) were administered appropriately and to explore the respondent's reaction to the fed-forward data. Of particular interest was whether respondents confirmed or challenged the previously-reported information, whether the prior wave data came into play when respondents were providing their current-wave answers, and how any discrepancies were negotiated by the interviewer and respondent. Also of interest was to examine the effectiveness of various styles of DI. For example, in some cases the prior wave data was brought forward and respondents were asked to explicitly confirm it; in other cases the previous data was read and respondents were asked if the situation was still the same. Results indicate varying levels of compliance in terms of initial question-reading, and suggest that some styles of DI may be more effective than others.

Description:

In longitudinal surveys nonresponse often occurs in a pattern that is not monotone. We consider estimation of time-dependent means under the assumption that the nonresponse mechanism is last-value-dependent. Since the last value itself may be missing when nonresponse is nonmonotone, the nonresponse mechanism under consideration is nonignorable. We propose an imputation method by first deriving some regression imputation models according to the nonresponse mechanism and then applying nonparametric regression imputation. We assume that the longitudinal data follow a Markov chain with finite second-order moments. No other assumption is imposed on the joint distribution of longitudinal data and their nonresponse indicators. A bootstrap method is applied for variance estimation. Some simulation results and an example concerning the Current Employment Survey are presented.

Description:

Sample weights can be calibrated to reflect the known population totals of a set of auxiliary variables. Predictors of finite population totals calculated using these weights have low bias if these variables are related to the variable of interest, but can have high variance if too many auxiliary variables are used. This article develops an "adaptive calibration" approach, where the auxiliary variables to be used in weighting are selected using sample data. Adaptively calibrated estimators are shown to have lower mean squared error and better coverage properties than non-adaptive estimators in many cases.

Description:

We propose a method for estimating the variance of estimators of changes over time, a method that takes account of all the components of these estimators: the sampling design, treatment of non-response, treatment of large companies, correlation of non-response from one wave to another, the effect of using a panel, robustification, and calibration using a ratio estimator. This method, which serves to determine the confidence intervals of changes over time, is then applied to the Swiss survey of value added.

Description:

The analysis of stratified multistage sample data requires the use of design information such as stratum and primary sampling unit (PSU) identifiers, or associated replicate weights, in variance estimation. In some public release data files, such design information is masked as an effort to avoid their disclosure risk and yet to allow the user to obtain valid variance estimation. For example, in area surveys with a limited number of PSUs, the original PSUs are split or/and recombined to construct pseudo-PSUs with swapped second or subsequent stage sampling units. Such PSU masking methods, however, obviously distort the clustering structure of the sample design, yielding biased variance estimates possibly with certain systematic patterns between two variance estimates from the unmasked and masked PSU identifiers. Some of the previous work observed patterns in the ratio of the masked and unmasked variance estimates when plotted against the unmasked design effect. This paper investigates the effect of PSU masking on variance estimates under cluster sampling regarding various aspects including the clustering structure and the degree of masking. Also, we seek a PSU masking strategy through swapping of subsequent stage sampling units that helps reduce the resulting biases of the variance estimates. For illustration, we used data from the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) with some artificial modification. The proposed strategy performs very well in reducing the biases of variance estimates. Both theory and empirical results indicate that the effect of PSU masking on variance estimates is modest with minimal swapping of subsequent stage sampling units. The proposed masking strategy has been applied to the 2003-2004 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) data release.

Description:

The design of a stratified simple random sample without replacement from a finite population deals with two main issues: the definition of a rule to partition the population into strata, and the allocation of sampling units in the selected strata. This article examines a tree-based strategy which plans to approach jointly these issues when the survey is multipurpose and multivariate information, quantitative or qualitative, is available. Strata are formed through a hierarchical divisive algorithm that selects finer and finer partitions by minimizing, at each step, the sample allocation required to achieve the precision levels set for each surveyed variable. In this way, large numbers of constraints can be satisfied without drastically increasing the sample size, and also without discarding variables selected for stratification or diminishing the number of their class intervals. Furthermore, the algorithm tends not to define empty or almost empty strata, thus avoiding the need for strata collapsing aggregations. The procedure was applied to redesign the Italian Farm Structure Survey. The results indicate that the gain in efficiency held using our strategy is nontrivial. For a given sample size, this procedure achieves the required precision by exploiting a number of strata which is usually a very small fraction of the number of strata available when combining all possible classes from any of the covariates.

Description:

Optimum stratification is the method of choosing the best boundaries that make strata internally homogeneous, given some sample allocation. In order to make the strata internally homogenous, the strata should be constructed in such a way that the strata variances for the characteristic under study be as small as possible. This could be achieved effectively by having the distribution of the main study variable known and create strata by cutting the range of the distribution at suitable points. If the frequency distribution of the study variable is unknown, it may be approximated from the past experience or some prior knowledge obtained at a recent study. In this paper the problem of finding Optimum Strata Boundaries (OSB) is considered as the problem of determining Optimum Strata Widths (OSW). The problem is formulated as a Mathematical Programming Problem (MPP), which minimizes the variance of the estimated population parameter under Neyman allocation subject to the restriction that sum of the widths of all the strata is equal to the total range of the distribution. The distributions of the study variable are considered as continuous with Triangular and Standard Normal density functions. The formulated MPPs, which turn out to be multistage decision problems, can then be solved using dynamic programming technique proposed by Bühler and Deutler (1975). Numerical examples are presented to illustrate the computational details. The results obtained are also compared with the method of Dalenius and Hodges (1959) with an example of normal distribution.

Description:

This paper considers the optimum allocation in multivariate stratified sampling as a nonlinear matrix optimisation of integers. As a particular case, a nonlinear problem of the multi-objective optimisation of integers is studied. A full detailed example including some of proposed techniques is provided at the end of the work.

Description:

The present work illustrates a sampling strategy useful for obtaining planned sample size for domains belonging to different partitions of the population and in order to guarantee the sampling errors of domain estimates be lower than given thresholds. The sampling strategy that covers the multivariate multi-domain case is useful when the overall sample size is bounded and consequently the standard solution of using a stratified sample with the strata given by cross-classification of variables defining the different partitions is not feasible since the number of strata is larger than the overall sample size. The proposed sampling strategy is based on the use of balanced sampling selection technique and on a GREG-type estimation. The main advantages of the solution is the computational feasibility which allows one to easily implement an overall small area strategy considering jointly the sampling design and the estimator and improving the efficiency of the direct domain estimators. An empirical simulation on real population data and different domain estimators shows the empirical properties of the examined sample strategy.

Description:

This is one of three fact sheets in the series using information from the 2006 Aboriginal Peoples Survey (APS) and 2006 Census. The purpose of this fact sheet is to provide information on the topics of access to health professionals, chronic conditions, smoking rates, dental care, barriers to school completion, food insecurity, harvesting country food and country food consumption and sharing. Results are presented for Inuit children aged six to 14 and Inuit aged 15 and over. Findings are for Inuit at the national level, for those in each of the four Inuit regions (Nunatsiavut, Nunavik, Nunavut and the Inuvialuit region) and in some cases, for those outside the Inuit regions.

Description:

This publication presents recent information on the performance and funding of Federal government expenditures on scientific activities, 2008/2009 (intentions). The statistics presented are derived from the survey of science and technology (S&T) activities of federal departments and agencies.

Description:

This is one of three fact sheets in the series using information from the 2006 Aboriginal Children's Survey (ACS) and 2006 Census. The purpose of this fact sheet is to provide information on the topics of family (persons involved in raising children, size of families, age of parents, lone parent families), socio-economic status (low-income economic families), feelings about community (as a place to raise children), and cultural activities (participation in traditional activities, having someone to help the child understand Métis history and culture, cultural activities in child care) for Métis children under six years of age.

Description:

This is one of three fact sheets in the series using information from the 2006 Aboriginal Children's Survey (ACS) and 2006 Census. The purpose of this fact sheet is to provide information on the topics of family (persons involved in raising children, size of families, age of parents, lone parent families, living with grandparents), socio-economic status (low-income economic families), feelings about community (as a place to raise children), and cultural activities (participation in traditional activities, having someone to help the child understand First Nations history and culture, cultural activities in child care) for First Nations children under 6 years of age living off reserve.

Description:

This is one of three fact sheets in the series using information from the 2006 Aboriginal Children's Survey (ACS) and 2006 Census. The purpose of this fact sheet is to provide information on the topics of family (persons involved in raising children, size of families, age of parents, adoption, living with grandparents), housing conditions (crowding, dwellings in need of major repairs, levels of satisfaction with housing conditions), feelings about community (facilities), and cultural activities (participation in traditional activities, having someone to help the child understand Inuit history and culture, cultural activities in child care). Results are presented for all Inuit children. Some results are also presented for those in Inuit Nunaat (meaning Inuit homeland): Nunatsiavut in northern Labrador, the territory of Nunavut, Nunavik in northern Quebec, and the Inuvialuit Settlement Region in the Northwest Territories.

Description:

This is one of three fact sheets in the series using information from the 2006 Aboriginal Children's Survey (ACS) and 2006 Census. The purpose of this fact sheet is to provide information on the topics of family (persons involved in raising children, size of families, age of parents, lone parent families), socio-economic status (low-income economic families), feelings about community (as a place to raise children), and cultural activities (participation in traditional activities, having someone to help the child understand Métis history and culture, cultural activities in child care) for Métis children under six years of age.

Description:

This is one of three fact sheets in the series using information from the 2006 Aboriginal Children's Survey (ACS) and 2006 Census. The purpose of this fact sheet is to provide information on the topics of family (persons involved in raising children, size of families, age of parents, lone parent families, living with grandparents), socio-economic status (low-income economic families), feelings about community (as a place to raise children), and cultural activities (participation in traditional activities, having someone to help the child understand First Nations history and culture, cultural activities in child care) for First Nations children under six years of age living off reserve.

Description:

This is one of three fact sheets in the series using information from the 2006 Aboriginal Children's Survey (ACS) and 2006 Census. The purpose of this fact sheet is to provide information on the topics of family (persons involved in raising children, size of families, age of parents, adoption, living with grandparents), housing conditions (crowding, dwellings in need of major repairs, levels of satisfaction with housing conditions), feelings about community (facilities), and cultural activities (participation in traditional activities, having someone to help the child understand Inuit history and culture, cultural activities in child care). Results are presented for all Inuit children. Some results are also presented for those in Inuit Nunaat (meaning Inuit homeland): Nunatsiavut in northern Labrador, the territory of Nunavut, Nunavik in northern Quebec, and the Inuvialuit Settlement Region in the Northwest Territories.

Description:

The information in this document is intended primarily to be used by scientific and technological (S&T) policy makers, both federal and provincial, largely as a basis for inter-provincial and inter-sectoral comparisons. The statistics are aggregates of the provincial government and provincial research organization science surveys conducted by Statistics Canada under contract with the provinces, and cover the period 2002/2003 to 2006/2007.

Description:

This service bulletin contains historical and current data on research and development (R&D) expenditures and personnel in Canada, by industry. In Canada, the industrial or business enterprise sector is the largest R&D performer.

Description:

This paper examines Ontario's and Quebec's adjustments to the resource boom. Higher commodity prices, an appreciating dollar, and increased foreign competition between 2002 and 2007 led to a restructuring of the Central Canadian economies. The restructuring manifested itself in all areas of the economy: manufacturing employment and output declined, while services and construction rose; within manufacturing there were declines across most industries in Ontario, and a shift away from consumer products towards capital products in Quebec; purchasing power increased in Ontario and Quebec as export and import prices adjusted.

Description:

This paper examines Ontario's and Quebec's adjustments to the resource boom. Higher commodity prices, an appreciating dollar, and increased foreign competition between 2002 and 2007 led to a restructuring of the Central Canadian economies. The restructuring manifested itself in all areas of the economy: manufacturing employment and output declined, while services and construction rose; within manufacturing there were declines across most industries in Ontario, and a shift away from consumer products towards capital products in Quebec; purchasing power increased in Ontario and Quebec as export and import prices adjusted.

Description:

This study investigates the dynamics of price transmission between the Canadian beef markets along the supply chain and the impact of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) on prices.

Description:

Households contribute to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in Canada both directly and indirectly. Direct emissions occur through the use of motor fuel and residential fuel, while indirect emissions result from the production of goods and services purchased by households. This article examines households' direct and indirect GHG emissions from 1990 to 2004.

Description: This study focuses on six environmental behaviours at the household level: use of reduced volume toilets; use of low-flow showerheads; use of compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFL); recycling; composting; and lowering temperatures. In 2006, almost half of Canadian households were very active across this range of environmental behaviours.

Description:

This article presents data on water conservation and septic system maintenance from the 2006 Households and the Environment Survey. It also compares conservation practices for households using public and private water services.

Description:

This article presents data on the use of light emitting diode (LED) holiday lighting using data from the 2007 Households and the Environment Survey.

Description:

Since only a small proportion of sexual offences are formally documented, the prevalence of sexual assault in Canada has been difficult to quantify. Using data from the 1999 and 2004 General Social Surveys (GSS) on victimization and police-reported data derived from the aggregate Uniform Crime Reporting Survey (UCR) and the incident-based Uniform Crime Reporting Survey (UCR2), the prevalence and nature of sexual assault in Canada is examined. Specifically, this report examines rates of sexual victimization; characteristics of victims and offenders; rates of police reporting; reasons for not reporting to police; the emotional effects of sexual victimization; as well as fear of crime and the use of precautionary measures by victims of sexual assault.

Description:

This paper examines firm turnover and productivity growth in the Canadian retail trade sector. Firm turnover occurs as the competitive process shifts market share from exiting firms and existing firms that contracted to entering firms and existing firms that expanded. There is considerably more firm turnover in the retail sector than in the manufacturing sector and more of it comes from entry and exit. Moreover, contrary to the manufacturing sector where only part of overall productivity growth comes from firm turnover and the re-allocation of resources from the less to the more productive, all of the aggregate productivity growth comes from this source in the retail sector. This suggests that the much-discussed Wal-Mart effect on retail sector productivity mainly comes from the Wal-Mart-created competitive pressure that shifts market share from exitors and declining incumbents to entrants and growing incumbents. Foreign-controlled firms contributed 30% of labour productivity growth and 45% of multifactor productivity growth in the retail trade sector in the period from 1984 to 1996, which are mainly due to the entry of foreign-controlled firms and expansion of more productive foreign-controlled existing firms.

Description:

The recent economic boom in the Canadian province of Alberta provides an ideal "natural experiment" to examine immigrants' responses to a strong labour demand outside major metropolitan centres. The key finding of our study, which is based on a unique dataset that combines administrative and immigrant records, is that not only did immigrants respond to the recent economic boom in Alberta, but they responded generally more strongly than non-immigrants. We find, however, a great deal of heterogeneity in the magnitude of the response across different regions and for different categories of immigrants.

Description: The Connectedness series publishes analytical studies as well as research reports in the broad area of connectedness. This includes the industrial areas of telecommunications, broadcasting, computer services and Internet Service Providers as well as cross economy activities such as the Internet and electronic commerce. It offers a statistical perspective in these emerging phenomena that are changing the economic and societal landscape of the country.

All papers are subject to peer and institutional review as well as review by subject matter experts, as necessary.

Description:

Matter of Fact is an analytic series highlighting what the General Social Survey (GSS) has contributed to understanding Canadian society over the last 20 years.

The 20 years of GSS data is an opportunity to look back over our years of data and ask: What have we learned about Canadian society over those 20 years?

This series will include short, focused, single-theme analysis documents. Over the course of the series analysis will include topics on: How satisfied are Canadians with their life in general? What is the relationship between education, work and retirement? What motivates people to retire or to continue working? How do people prepare for retirement? How is the Internet changing the way Canadians live? How are Canadians using their time? What do Canadian families look like? How have they changed in recent years? How are Canadians engaged with their families, neighbours, communities and coworkers? Which Canadians are caring for others? What is the impact of care-giving on people's work, families, leisure time and health? What are the victimization rates for Canadians, and who is most at risk of victimization? How have housing trends changed over the past 20 years? And how have religious practices changed over the past 20 years?

Description:

This book is designed to contribute to the foundation of basic information that leaders and researchers will need when they begin to devote much more time and resources to the institutional adjustments that the up-coming wave of retirements among baby boomers will require. Its contents deal with aspects of retirement that have been outside the main focus in the research literature, but which will likely receive much greater attention in the future. These aspects include social issues arising from the emergence of a large number of people who form a substantial proportion of the adult population and whose length of time in retirement will be as long as that of a generation, roughly 25 years; women's retirement; family dynamics and retirement; and retirement processes among people with no career job as conventionally defined. A large part of the book is devoted to scientific papers that are based upon Statistics Canada's data and which require substantial innovations of useful concepts and data series that serve to illustrate the potentials of our data.

Description:

The International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) was a seven-country initiative conducted in the fall of 1994. Its goal was to create comparable literacy profiles across national, linguistic and cultural boundaries. Successive waves of the survey now encompass close to 30 countries around the world. This monograph series features detailed studies from the IALS database by literacy scholars and experts in Canada and the United States. The research is primarily funded by Human Resources Development Canada. Monographs focus on current policy issues and cover topics such as adult training, literacy skill match and mismatch in the workplace, seniors' literacy skills and health, literacy and economic security, and many others.

Description:

This report presents details on the data sources and methods underlying the air quality indicators as they were reported in Canadian Environmental Sustainability Indicators, 2007 (16-251-XWE). The air quality indicators focus on human exposure to ground-level ozone and fine particulate matter.

Details on the indicators reported after 2007 can be found on Environment Canada's site: &&www.ec.gc.ca/indicateurs-indicators/

Description:

This report presents details on the data sources and methods underlying the greenhouse gas emissions indicator as it was reported in Canadian Environmental Sustainability Indicators, 2007 (16-251-XWE). The greenhouse gas indicator describes the trend in emissions and the contribution to the trend by energy production, energy consumption and other factors.

Details on this indicator reported after 2007 can be found on Environment Canada's site: www.ec.gc.ca/indicateurs-indicators/

Description:

This report presents details on the data sources and methods underlying the freshwater quality indicator as it was reported in the Canadian Environmental Sustainability Indicators, 2007 (16-251-XWE). The national freshwater quality indicator provides an overall measure of the suitability of water bodies to support aquatic life in selected monitoring sites in Canada.

Details on this indicator reported after 2007 can be found on Environment Canada's site: www.ec.gc.ca/indicateurs-indicators/

Description:

This series of fact sheets and accompanying reports examines issues affecting Inuit in Canada. The main focus is on those living in the four Inuit land claim settlement regions in the Arctic: Nunatsiavut in northern Labrador, the territory of Nunavut, Nunavik in northern Quebec, and the Inuvialuit Settlement Region in the Northwest Territories.

Description:

This publication analyzes the sales of alcoholic beverages in Canada. The report also sets out, in detail, government revenue derived from the control and sale of alcoholic beverages. Analytical text, tables and charts are featured as well as information on imports and exports of spirits, wines and beer. Historical data are included. The publication is an excellent source of information on sales patterns of alcoholic beverages in Canada.

This publication is temporarily suspended until 2012. However, the data will continue to be produced and released through CANSIM tables 183-0006 and in 183-0015 to 183-0020. Data Tables on sales of alcoholic beverages are also available free of charge from the National economic accounts module of our website.

Description:

This report summarizes the main issues raised in these meetings. Four questions used to identify Aboriginal people from the Census and surveys were considered in the discussions.Statistics Canada regularly reviews the questions used on the Census and other surveys to ensure that the resulting data are representative of the population. As a first step in the process to review the questions used to produce data about First Nations, Inuit and Métis populations, regional discussions were held with more than 350 users of Aboriginal data in over 40 locations across Canada during the winter, spring and early summer of 2007.

This report summarizes the main issues raised in these meetings. Four questions used to identify Aboriginal people from the Census and surveys were considered in the discussions.