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4 - Counting and estimating hard-to-survey populations in the 2011 Census

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 September 2014

By
Owen Abbott  and
Garnett Compton
Edited by
Roger Tourangeau ,
Brad Edwards ,
Timothy P. Johnson ,
Kirk M. Wolter  and
Nancy Bates
Owen Abbott
Affiliation:
Office for National Statistics, UK
Garnett Compton
Affiliation:
Office for National Statistics, UK
Roger Tourangeau
Affiliation:
Westat Research Organisation, Maryland
Brad Edwards
Affiliation:
Westat Research Organisation, Maryland
Timothy P. Johnson
Affiliation:
University of Illinois, Chicago
Kirk M. Wolter
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
Nancy Bates
Affiliation:
US Census Bureau
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Summary

Introduction

The census provides a once-in-a decade opportunity to get an accurate, comprehensive, and consistent picture of the population of the United Kingdom. Every effort is made to ensure everyone is counted. The field operation includes many different methods for attempting to count everyone within its overall strategy, and this can include targeting populations that are known to be hard to count. However, no census is perfect and some people are missed, particularly those from hard-to-count groups. These are not uniformly distributed across geography or important subgroups of the population, such as age and sex groups.

A key output from the census is local authority population estimates by age and sex. Local authorities are the 348 local government areas that vary in size from 5,000 to 1 million people. It is important that these census outputs are fit for the purposes they will be put to – for example, resource allocation where hard-to-count minority groups can be those that attract higher levels of funding. To address the likely census nonresponse, a survey-based approach is used to estimate the population that is missed, and the results are used to adjust the census dataset to include representation for that nonresponse. This approach was used successfully in the 2001 Census.

Type
Chapter
Information
Hard-to-Survey Populations , pp. 58 - 81
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2014

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References

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