Base population

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The base population for this version of Demosim is essentially derived from the 2011 National Household Survey (NHS) microdata file,^Note 1 a database containing approximately 7.3 million records that represent the Canadian population living in private households on May 10, 2011. The main variables of the base population are as follows:^Note 2

• Age
• Sex
• Place of residence: census metropolitan area (CMA), province or territory, Indian reserve, and Inuit Nunangat
• Aboriginal group
• Registered Indian status
• Registration category on the Indian Register (6(1) or 6(2))
• Marital status (including mixed unions)
• Place of birth (province/territory or country/world region)
• Immigrant status and time elapsed since immigration
• Generation status
• Immigrant admission category
• Visible minority group
• Religion
• Mother tongue
• Language spoken most often at home
• Knowledge of official languages
• Highest level of schooling
• Head-of-household status
• Head-of-family status
• Labour force participation

Registration category on the Indian Register and immigrant admission category are two variables that were added through file linkages, as they were not included in the NHS database. Registration category, which defines the conditions for children to inherit registered Indian status from their parents, was obtained from a pre-existing linkage between the Indian Register and the 2011 NHS (through the 2011 Census), to identify, among NHS respondents who reported being Registered Indians, those who had status under subsection 6(1) of the Indian Act and those who had status under subsection 6(2).^Note 3 In 66% of cases, registration category was determined through file linkage. For the remaining 34%, categories 6(1) and 6(2) were either deterministically imputed using information on the registration of other census family members, or else were imputed using a probabilistic model (logistic regression).^Note 4 Immigrant admission category (economic, humanitarian, family reunification or other) was obtained using pre-existing linkages between the Citizenship and Immigration Canada landing files from 1980 to 2011 and the 2011 NHS (via the 2011 Census). The linkage was successful for 82% of those who reported in the NHS being admitted to Canada as immigrants in 1980 or later. For the remaining 18%, the variable was probabilistically imputed using multinomial logistic regression models. For immigrants admitted before 1980, the admission category remains unknown.

Some adjustments were also made to the NHS microdata file so that the Demosim base population reflects the entire Canadian population as closely as possible.

The population living on the 31 Indian reserves that were incompletely enumerated in the 2011 Census and the five additional Indian reserves that did not respond to the NHS were added to the Demosim base population. For 13 of the 31 incompletely enumerated reserves in the census, the NHS questionnaire was administered during a special collection several months later than the planned date, as forest fires prevented the collection from being carried out.^Note 5 The records from this special collection were added to the Demosim base population. For the population of the 18 other Indian reserves that were incompletely enumerated in the census, it was assumed that the population was consistent with estimates produced by the Social Survey Methods Division of Statistics Canada. Records were then imputed with characteristics that were representative of similarly sized reserves enumerated in the same province. A similar imputation was performed for the five reserves enumerated in the census but not in the NHS, calibrating their population to the 2011 Census counts by age group and sex.

Lastly, adjustments were made to obtain a population that was representative of the population estimates of May 10, 2011, which included people living in collective dwellings, and which account for net undercoverage in the census. The adjustment for collective dwellings involved multiplying the sampling weights of individuals by the ratio of the 2011 Census population (which includes collective dwellings) to the NHS population by age, sex and place of residence.^Note 6 Net undercoverage rates were then applied to the sampling weights by age, sex and place of residence.

All of these adjustments increased the total population by about 1.4 million people. These adjustments had a greater impact on certain population subgroups—notably young adults, who had higher net undercoverage rates, and Registered Indians, because of the adjustment for the incompletely enumerated reserves.^Note 7

Notes