Counting people in the data revolution era: challenges and opportunities for population censuses^*

* The article is the result of the work of both authors, but while Introduction, Conclusion, second, third and fourth sections may be attributed to Biagio Aragona, the fifth, sixth and seventh sections are of Donatella Zindato.

ABSTRACT

Changes in technology, society and individual behaviours are having impressive effects on data production and use. Social networks, sensors and data infrastructure are generating a massive amount of new data (big data, big corpora, linked data, open data, etc.) that are readily available for the analysis of societies. Official statistics too is starting to pay attention to these unofficial data sources, to the aim of using them within the production processes. Despite the potentials of new data for statistical production, so far we can depict two main effects on official statistics, and especially on population censuses. First of all, there is the digitalization of data construction through both new instruments (e.g. web questionnaires) and new means of collection (e.g. tablets). Furthermore, the integration and the scaling-up of data archives is ongoing. This transition from the traditional ‘door-to-door’ census to new census methods, which make an higher use of technology, is not only a technical result, but it reflects the extent to which digital data are changing the routines of production of statistics and their use to gain social knowledge.

KEYWORDS:

• Population census
• new data culture
• register-based statistics
• administrative data mining
• unobtrusive methods

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Biagio Aragona, PhD, is assistant professor in Sociology and adjunct professor of Social Research Methods and Advanced Methods for Quantitative Research at the Department of Social Sciences of the University of Naples Federico II. His research activity is mainly on the use of statistical sources for the analysis of social inequalities and on the study of challenges and opportunities that big data and others new data offer to social sciences.

Donatella Zindato is Senior Researcher at Istat. Head of the Unit for ‘Operational planning and implementation of the Continuous Census’, she has been working on the design and implementation of the 2001 and 2011 Italian censuses and has longstanding experience as international expert in technical assistance projects. Her research activity is mainly focused on the use of census data for analysing characteristics of migrants and geographical patterns of foreign presence in Italy and on the study of commuting flows.

ORCID

Biagio Aragona http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8697-2932

Notes

* The article is the result of the work of both authors, but while Introduction, Conclusion, second, third and fourth sections may be attributed to Biagio Aragona, the fifth, sixth and seventh sections are of Donatella Zindato.

1. The logistics of the mail out/mail back process proved very complex and with many potential (and actual) points of failure such as the difficulties by the contractor system in processing millions of addresses coming from the municipal registers and in delivering questionnaires by post – which resulted in about 2,000,000 questionnaires that had to be delivered directly by the enumerators and the fact that information about questionnaires returned to post offices was not always reported promptly, making it impossible for municipal offices to keep track of which households had to be contacted to prompt completion of the questionnaires.