Data quality, concepts and methodology: Technical notes
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Scope and limitations of the data
The expenditures data for scientific activities controlled by federal departments and agencies provided in this document correspond to the budgetary expenditures by program presented in Main Estimates for the approval of Parliament. The following kinds of non-budgetary costs or expenditures are not included:
- loans or advances to and investments in Crown Corporations; loans or advances for specific purposes to other governments and international organizations or persons or corporations in the private sector.
Reliability of the data
All the possible sources of error were examined. Definitions have been taken from a compendium of methods of error evaluation in censuses and surveys, Statistics Canada, catalogue no. 13-564-X.
- A complete enumeration is carried out of all federal departments and agencies involved in scientific activities.
- Being a census, coverage and non-response are very minor causes of error.
- No imputation, coding, or sampling is done by Statistics Canada for this exercise.
Data capture
The data capture operation in a census or survey consists of converting the data received on questionnaires (e.g., respondent answers) or coding forms to a machine readable format.
All data capture for science statistics is through manual intervention, at a computer terminal.
Significant uncorrected data capture errors are unlikely because of the examination of numerous tables and listings prepared for data analysis before publication tables are created. Mistakes in expenditures due to coding error are believed to be less than 1%.
Edit
The edit procedures usually consist of:
- checking each field of every record to ascertain whether it contains a valid code or entry;
- checking codes or entries in certain predetermined combinations of fields to ascertain whether codes or entries are consistent with one another. Although there are a number of edits, all cases of failed edit checks are corrected after consideration by editors.
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