Quality assessment for register-based statistics - Results for the Austrian census 2011

In 2011, Statistics Austria carried out its first register-based census. Advantages of using administrative data for statistical purposes are, among others, a reduced burden for respondents and lower cost for the National Statistical Institutes (NSI). However, new challenges, like need for a new approach to the quality assessment of this kind of data arise. Therefore, Statistics Austria developed a comprehensive standardized framework to evaluate data quality for register-based statistics. In this paper, we present the basic concept of this quality framework and provide detailed results from the quality evaluation of the Austrian census of 2011. More specifically, we derive a quality measure for each census attribute from four complementary hyperdimensions. The first three of these hyperdimensions address the documentation of data, the usability of records and an external data validation. The fourth hyperdimension focuses on the quality of data imputations. The proposed framework combines these different quality-related information sources for each attribute to form an overall quality indicator. This procedure allows to track changes in quality during data processing and to compare the quality of different census generations.