September 24, 2019

Census news

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The first data release from the Census happened yesterday.  There are more people in New Zealand than there were in 2013.  In Auckland, 42% of the population were born overseas. There’s going to be a new electorate in the North Island somewhere. And various other facts.

I’ve been on an independent expert panel providing an external review of data quality. We also gave our first report yesterday.  It’s here.

Basically, there’s good news and bad news.

  • Stats NZ used the 2013 Census and other government data to fill in people who were missing from the 2018 Census, and to bring in their data where available
  • It worked well for general population counts.
  • It didn’t work at all for some variables, because they don’t have other data sources
  • It worked to varying degrees for other variables
  • The quality depends a lot on what you want to use it for
  • We weren’t convinced about social and cultural license for the use of administrative data

Reading the executive summary of the report is a good way to be at least slightly informed (relative to, say, Twitter), but you could also read the whole thing — we hope it’s fairly accessible.

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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 »

Comments

  • avatar
    Steve Curtis

    Its a strange situation with census website still giving the estimated population ( updated every couple of months) of 4.92 mill as at 30 June.
    They had an interactive graph yesterday ( removed today and replaced by age groups tables and graph) which showed the estimate at 31 Mar 2017 ( same month as census) of 4,829,000.
    Thats around 115,000 more than the census night count.
    The estimated population is derived from last census count plus excess of births over deaths and migration counts.
    The missing 115,000 seems to have had a deliberate hiding of the stats, rather than explaining the variance

    5 years ago