Methodology

The UN Expert Group on National Quality Assurance Frameworks and its Subgroup on administrative and other data sources are hosting a global seminar on assuring the quality when administrative and other data sources are used for producing official statistics.

The use of existing administrative and other data sources replacing surveys is widely considered to be cost-effective and to reduce the response burden. In some countries the use of administrative data sources is an established practice, while other countries are moving towards their increased use. The objective is to make use of data that already exists, may be available with greater timeliness and can provide reliable statistics with much greater granularity and disaggregation, for example, allowing to provide information on different population groups. The promise of using “other” data sources (other than statistical and administrative data sources) such as data available in the private sector at e.g., telecommunication or insurance companies, or with citizens themselves is holding the similar promise of being able to provide official statistics (and microdata files) much timelier at much lower cost and with much greater disaggregation.

The use of such data sources poses special challenges as the data was not compiled for the purpose of producing official statistics. These challenges when using administrative and other data sources for producing official statistics will be discussed in this seminar. Specifically, this seminar will focus on, and provide examples, on how quality aspects of the source data, the source itself and the production processes can impact the quality of the final statistical output.

Tentative Agenda:

• Welcome and Introduction
• Introduction of the work of the Subgroup
• Challenges of using of administrative data for production of official statistics in Namibia, by the Namibia Statistics Agency
• Challenges when using administrative data, by the National Administrative Department of Statistics of Colombia (DANE – Colombia)
• The Impact of Processing Administrative Sources on the Quality of Statistical Outputs, by Statistics Canada
• Istat framework for monitoring, documenting and assessing the quality of the Integrated System of Statistical Registers, by the Italian National Institute of Statistics
• Q&A Session
• Closing Remarks