2016 Census Program Content Consultation Guide: Overview

As part of the review and evaluation of its statistical programs, Statistics Canada studied methodological options and content determination criteria for the 2016 Census Program. These findings are presented in the Final Report on 2016 Census Options: Proposed Content Determination Framework and Methodology Options and the compendium 2016 Census Strategy Project: Data Uses and Requirements Report, available from the Statistics Canada website.

The content determination framework for the 2016 Census Program builds on experience from previous Canadian Census Programs, the United Nations (UN) principles of census-taking (United Nations 2008), and approaches developed in other countries, in particular, the United Kingdom (Office for National Statistics 2006).

This framework includes three main steps that would result in a prioritization of Census Program content. Each step comprises specific dimensions, as listed in Table 1, against which potential content will be evaluated.

Table 1 Steps of the content determination framework and their dimensions
Description

Table 1 presents the dimensions for each step of the content determination framework. The first column ("Steps") in the table contains the three steps and the second column ("Dimensions") shows the dimensions.

Steps Dimensions
Step 1:
Census Program information needs
(relevance and quality requirements of users)
  • strength of user need
  • size of the population of interest
  • suitability of alternative sources
  • cross-classification of data / multivariate analysisFootnote 1
  • comparability across Canada
  • continuity over time
  • frequency of outputs
Step 2:
Canadian context
  • respondent burden
  • societal privacy concerns
Balance of topics
Step 3:
Statistics Canada considerations
  • costs
  • operational factors
  • safeguards against loss of Census Program data quality
  • safeguards against loss of efficiency and/or quality in other Statistics Canada programs
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