Signs that you might not know what you are talking about
“We’re spending $70 per person to fill this out. That’s just not cost effective,” he continued, “especially since in the end this is not a scientific survey. It’s a random survey.”
That’s US Congressman Daniel Webster, quoted in the New York Times talking about the American Community Survey, the more-detailed part of the US Census that is administered to a 2% sample of Americans each year. As you know, the fact that the ACS is based on a random sample is what makes it a scientific survey, and it is a very valuable one to US government and business as well as to researchers.
If the NZ census goes to a ten-year rather than five-year cycle, an interim sample similar to the ACS would be one way of maintaining up-to-date and accurate information at reasonable cost. Or we could just leave information collection to Facebook and Wikipedia.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »