A friend of mine just sent me a link to this news story and it’s gotten me quite livid:
Tories scrap mandatory long-form census
StatsCan says quality of data will suffer
Every five years, Canada conducts a census, with the next one scheduled for 2011. In the past, every household received the short census form, which contains just a few questions (like number of people in the home and their age and sex) and 1 in every 5 households received a mandatory long form. The long form contained questions about a variety of things, like income, education, and ethnicity, and provided a lot of really important information about the population of Canada. For example, I work in health care and we use census data all the time. Knowing the makeup of our population allows us to make informed decisions about providing health care to meet the needs of the people living in our region. All levels of governments (municipal, provincial and federal), community agencies, and other organizations use the data from the census long form to develop evidence-informed policy.
But the ability to do that now at risk, as the federal government has, apparently without consulting anyone, decided to scrap the mandatory long form, citing that the long form represented “what most Canadians felt was an intrusion into their personal privacy in terms of answering the longer form” (Source) – though I haven’t seen from anything I’ve read thus far how they determined that this is how “most” Canadians feel. Instead, they are replacing it with a “voluntary household survey” that will be sent to 1 in 3 households, the members of which can choose to complete – or not to complete – the survey. This raises very serious concerns about the quality of the data – the people who choose not to respond to the long survey may be different from those who choose to respond to it, which will result in skewed information. Which means we won’t have the data we need to make policies and provide appropriate services.
“Senior statisticians at Statistics Canada have conceded the change will make it more difficult to obtain reliable, detailed information.” (Source)
All of this brings up questions about politicians’ understanding of the importance of data and evidence-informed practice, not to mention their ignoring the scientific experts on the matter – in this case, the statisticians at Stats Canada. As David Eaves noted in his article, “Why you should care about the sudden demise of the mandatory long census form”:
“This is a direct attack on the ability of government to make smart decisions. It is an attack on evidence-based public policy. Moreover, it was a political decision – it came from the minister’s office and does not appear to reflect what Statistics Canada either wants or recommends. Of course, some governments prefer not to have information; all that data and evidence gets in the way of legislation and policies that are ineffective, costly and that reward vested interests (I’m looking at you, tough-on-crime agenda). ” [emphasis mine; Source]
In another news article on the topic I read:
Liberal MP Marlene Jennings “argued that Clement has shown in postings to the social media site Twitter that he does not understand how the mandatory nature of the long-form census allows Statistics Canada to properly weight the short form data. Clement debated sample size and data weighting with other posters, including an economist.
“(That’s) something Mr. Clement seemed not to understand when he was tweeting yesterday, so maybe he should take a stats course,” she said” (Source)
This lead me to check out Clement’s Twitter stream, where he referred to having a mandatory (as opposed to voluntary) long form as “state coercion” – I guess it’s fine to have the state “coerce” you to complete the short form – or, you know, obey any of our other laws – but they draw the line at the long form?
Now, as Dave mentioned in his most recent posting, we here at The Black Hole don’t want to just complain about problems, but rather want to focus on what we can do about addressing those problems. To this end, I’d like to note that the Liberals are demanding the Conservatives reverse this decision to scrap the mandatory long form and, if they don’t, to introduce legislation to protect it themselves. Personally, I’ll be writing to my own MP and Industry Minister Tony Clement to inform them about why the long form is so vital. And I’ll be writing to some Liberals to suggest that they stick to their guns on this one and introduce legislation to protect the mandatory long form.
Tip: Don’t know who your MP is? You can search here to find out!
Update: There is now a petition on this issue. Check out: http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/keep-the-canadian-census-long-form.html
But… but… you need a *random* sample to perform statistical analysis! It’s disheartening to imagine how much money will be spent distributing the “voluntary household survey” to generate such low-utility data.
What has this got to do with Science trainees in Canada ? Other than random tory-bashing?
Hey Beth, I couldn’t agree more that the long form census form is an essential tool for population research and guiding government programs that serve Canadians. I will be contacting my MP for sure. thanks for sharing as I wasn’t aware of this.
Sonn – to call this random Tory bashing is pretty unfair. The census data is a tool that many scientists and social scientists use daily in their research. While it might not be directly relevant to whichever field of science you are in or thinking of when making this comment, it has a huge effect on trainees in epidemiology, public health, civil engineering, and even industry bound trainees.
This blog is on issues affecting science trainees and a move like this which strips information from the public domain and many researchers is something we definitely see as having an effect.
Hope this helps explain a little why we found it important to post.
Dave
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Nobody has said the long form “wasn’t vital” which is why nobody is “scrapping” it.
What was said was that when the long form with its detailed list of questions is handed out, some people don’t feel comfortable giving that information and respectfully decline. They never do give out that information. In practice, a nonzero number of people never will fill out the long form. They will be threatened with legal sanctions — which for the long form StatsCan doesn’t go through with anyways — and ultimately the information that you want them to provide to the government never does get provided. If they begrudgingly do end up providing information on the form, it will likely be less valuable to StatsCan than no data whatsoever.
Census data will still be collected. Advocacy groups will still have “this critical research tool”. Companies will still pay assloads of money to Stats Can in return for access to this information. All that happens is that the missing datapoints won’t be from people looking over their shoulders to see when Statistics Canada is going to haul their ass to jail.
@FACLC – By changing the long form from mandatory to voluntary, they are effectively “scrapping” the long form that gives us the vital information we need and replacing it with something that will give us skewed information. There is no statistical technique that will be able to fix this.
As for claims that many Canadians are concerned about their privacy when it comes to the questions asked on the long form, the Conservatives have been unable to provide any evidence to back up that claim. There have been three complaints to the privacy commissioner about the long form in the last decade and three out of 30+ million is a very, very small number. Similarly, I see that the blog posting you link to tells a little story about two people who lied on the long-form in two separate censuses. As Derek’s trackback on your blog posting says, that’s just “an anecdote without context to show how widespread [lying on the census] is, which is precisely the sort of potentially misleading information that real statistics are designed to counteract…”
They aren’t “effectively scrapping the long form” either. It didn’t give you any more or less “vital” information as is. Your information is already being skewed: nobody independently confirms the results and anybody who refuses to answer simply doesn’t answer. Whether they suffer threats or actual legal action is irrelevent: they don’t answer the question.
The two people who were telling me how they lied on the census never complained to the privacy commissioner. They didn’t write their MP, they didn’t seek out the Ombudsman for Statistics Canada nor write a letter to the editor. They didn’t even, in four (or nine) years of drinking with me ever grumble about it. They may be in a minority, they may not. There is no “ability in real statistics” to reliably filter information out in a self-survey. There are techniques that, when applied retroactively in response to known data, can mitigate the inaccuracies (though on occasion cause more); but there is no “known data” in this case: just data that people are required to fill out which most do and StatsCan is left crossing their fingers that lying isn’t particularly prevalent.
As to whether or not it is or is not prevalent, however, isn’t entirely the point. The anecdote wasn’t to show “how widespread lying on the census is”, its to show that making the form mandatory doesn’t ensure that you’ll get a beautiful new set of pure data: instead of refusing to fill a question out (as Ezra Levant did in 1996) so StatsCan can say “7% of Canadians refuse to say if who does the dishes in their homes” the question is filled out incorrectly and StatsCan bravely publishes that only 13% of Canadian men don’t throw throw out the garbage. If they claimed the same percentage watched “Gilmore Girls” while Nielsen and its automatic testing box showed differently they could make adjustments. In the current system, they can’t. As social engineers ask more and more intimate questions to set big government policy, the gap between the truth and what people write down may grow in moderately unpredictable ways (I’m sure it shocks no-one that Albertans, according to a Ledger poll out today, are the most likely to lie or omit questions they don’t want Ottawa knowing the answers to).
We already see large scale distortions with social media and new sensitivity to privacy concerns. Like it or not, there is a slow (or maybe not slow! has bilingualism in non-Quebec francophones gone up or down?) shift in attitudes about adding information to databanks. To borrow your phrase, there is no statistical technique that will be able to fix this.