Quality assessment for register-based statistics - Results for the Austrian census 2011

Abstract

In 2011, Statistics Austria carried out the first register-based census. The use of administrative data for statistical purposes is accompanied by various advantages like a reduced burden for the respondents and less costs for the NSI. However, new challenges, like the quality assessment of this kind of data, arise. Therefore, Statistics Austria developed a comprehensive standardized framework for the evaluation of the data quality for registerbased statistics. In this paper, we present the principle of the quality framework and detailed results from the quality evaluation of the 2011 Austrian census. For each attribute in the census a quality measure is derived from four hyperdimensions. The first three hyperdimensions focus on the documentation of data, the usability of the records and the comparison of data to an external source. The fourth hyperdimension assesses the quality of the imputations. In the framework all the available information on each attribute can be combined to form one final quality indicator. This procedure allows to track changes in quality during data processing and to compare the quality of different census generations.