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Sample and Frame Maintenance Procedures for Census and Household Surveys

Imperfect frames are a well known and inevitable source of non-sampling error in surveys. The aim of Sample and Frame Maintenance Procedures (SFMP) is to reduce the amount of non-sampling error caused by imperfect frames in ABS surveys.

The key design feature of SFMP is to ensure consistent procedures are applied between surveys and to assist staff in making decisions about how to treat differences between a real world unit and the representation on the frame. SFMP has been used in ABS business surveys for many years.

One of the major changes to the Census 2016 enumeration model is to rely on mailing out rather than physically dropping off information to dwellings in some areas. The dwelling address list is the frame extracted from the ABS Address Register. The Address Register is based on the Geocoded National Address File (G-NAF) which contains all physical addresses in Australia, irrespective of their use. The Census counts dwellings rather than addresses, and the relationship between dwelling and address can vary in the real world.

The aim of the dwelling frame is to represent each residential dwelling once and only once. However, some possible scenarios are:

· there is one dwelling at the address

· there are multiple dwellings at the address

· the address is a duplicate of another address on the frame

· there is no dwelling at the address (e.g. commercial property, vacant land, other feature with an address)

· there is a dwelling under construction at the address.

Sample & Frame Maintenance seeks to improve counts and estimates by making the best possible use of information about quality issues in the frame. It is important to have consistent procedures that are able to be applied by staff in data collection and processing so that each dwelling is correctly contributing to Census counts and survey estimates. The current focus of the SFMP project is to develop and test procedures primarily for use in the Census August 2014 tests and the 2016 Census.

Currently Household Surveys use quite different procedures because they use an area based frame, where details of the particular dwellings selected are not known prior to the beginning of the field process. In future, Household Surveys may use the Address Register to create and select a list of addresses to be included in the survey, which SFMP can support. Therefore, while developing Census SFMP, we also aim to develop an enterprise solution to the problem of address register based sample and frame maintenance for both Census and Household Surveys by ensuring that the procedures, principles and statuses developed will support Household Surveys in the future.

Further Information
For more information, please contact Amanda Norton (02 6252 5705, amanda.norton@abs.gov.au) or Pavka Stevanovic (03 9615 7581, pavka.stevanovic@abs.gov.au)

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