Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2024 February 6

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February 6

Birth certificate-based census

Census#Technology and elsewhere describes somewhat complex ways to count population (including going from house to house). But wouldn't digitally pulling data out from birth certificates and/or national ID documents (for which usually there's a central depository in many countries) be the easiest way to perform census (also almost in real time)? With the deceased excluded via death certificates or other cross-checking, of course. 212.180.235.46 (talk) 18:39, 6 February 2024 (UTC)

They have to count everyone, not just citizens. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 21:39, 6 February 2024 (UTC)

There are countries which do what the OP seems to be getting at. The OP seems to have missed it but our article mentions "or administrative records for the dwelling are accessed" and "Other countries that have a population register use this as a basis for all the census statistics needed by users. This is most common among Nordic countries, but requires many distinct registers to be combined, including population, housing, employment and education. and "The Netherlands has been most advanced in adopting a census using administrative data. This allows a simulated census to be conducted by linking several different administrative databases at an agreed time."

There is some more discussion in those sections and elsewhere which also briefly mention the limitations of such approaches.

Note an important point is that even when these work, they're a lot more complicated than the OP seems to envision. Even for citizens, simply using birth certificates doesn't work, the OP has mentioned deceased but most countries are not interested in counting citizens who are not living in the country as the point of a census is generally to count the country's current population not the population they could have in other circumstances.

Remember, there is no guarantee someone born in a country is ever going to come back. For starters, if they are died somewhere else this might never be reported to the country of birth. But even if they aren't dead, they might have citizen elsewhere including citizenship from birth (e.g. from parents) and so might have been living in this other country nearly their whole lives, as plenty of countries allow dual citizenship. Of course you don't need dual citizenship since they might have also given up citizenship in the country with the birth certificate and this might not be recorded anywhere in the birth record.

There might be other sources of data e.g. passport and migration records which might have info on whether the person left but the quality of these is likely to vary especially for people who left several decades ago. Likewise these records might have data on documented migrations, but again their quality is likely to vary.

For obvious reasons, none of them are likely to have good data on undocumented migrants which many countries try to count with assurances the data won't be used to pursue them in anyway. (Many countries also try to collect accurate information on earnings, again with assurances it won't be used for other things like prosecution for tax evasion.)

And you've still only figured out whether a person is living in the country. You haven't figured out where, which tends to be quite important. The census is often used for deciding election boundaries or the number of seats. There might be other data sources which have this info, or maybe there isn't. It might be required for certain social programmes, or tax purposes or it might not be; and these might only apply to a subset of the population. It's going to depend a lot on the countries.

Some data which a country is interested in collecting may intentionally not be in other records, e.g. in NZ; ethnicity, religion and more recently sexual orientation are question on the census with the ethnicity one even being sort of not optional (but you can just give an answer like Kiwi) [1]; but are things not collected elsewhere intentionally. (Official forms can ask ethnicity data for statistical purposes, but I assume this means it might be disassociated from your profile.) Even simple things like languages spoken, how you get to work, and how much unpaid work you do might not have the same opposition to collection, but are not AFAIK, generally collected elsewhere.

In federal countries you might have disputes between federal authorities and state ones. For example AFAIK in the US, birth certificate, death certificates and marriage certificates are generally issued by the states. Given the frequent disputes between states and the federal government, and the constitutional restrictions on how they interact; I'm unconvinced it would be easy to get them to hand over all the data, or to do a census properly themselves. And let's not forget the tendency of many of them to gerrymander even when they have okay census data which makes one wonder how much you can trust them to do a proper administrative-only census.

The federal government might have their own data, but again the quality is likely to vary. E.g. per my earlier point. The US has the ability for married couples to file jointly for tax purposes and I guess it might also matter for some social programmes, and perhaps if you work for them. But AFAIK, if you're not involved in any of that there's no reason the federal government has to know you're married.

I don't think you can assume even countries with national ID systems have better data, again it's going to depend on the country. I know in Malaysia you're supposed to update your address within 90 days [2] [3] [4], but plenty of people don't bother and their MyKad still has an old address [5] [6].

Beyond the data limits I already mentioned, another issue is likely to be whether such approaches are even something which the population finds acceptable. This that I said 17+ years ago IMO still applies, Talk:Census/Archive 1#Methods of performing the census. Despite the significant increases in data collection by governments, a lot of this is intentionally hidden.

In some countries like the US, but frankly a lot of the developed anglosphere like the UK, NZ, Australia and probably Canada (i.e. ironically all the Five Eyes), the census is something somewhat tolerated with the believe that their information will be protected against dodgy governments.

But I think convincing the population they should accept a system which pulls all the data the government holds on them even if it's enough, won't be easy in such countries. Even if it's simply a case of all these different departments/whatever sending all their data to the census department, I suspect you'd find strong opposition. We can see what happened to the proposal for a partly voluntary national ID in the UK: Identity Cards Act 2006.

Nil Einne (talk) 03:43, 7 February 2024 (UTC)

BTW, looking into the 2018 New Zealand census#Issues and controversies might be illustrative. As mentioned there, the 2018 census in NZ suffered from a low response rate attributed to an excessive focus on filling out the forms online. There was an attempt to fill in the gaps using administrative data, but AFAIK, it's well accepted that the quality is more limited. Dependent also on precisely what data point you're looking. Of course NZ doesn't really have the systems to do this, so it's likely the quality would be better if we did, but you can probably find some discussions on how good the data would be if we did. Nil Einne (talk) 03:57, 7 February 2024 (UTC)

I should clarify that AFAIK, many countries recognise that they're unlikely to receive anything close to a 100% response rate, and the non-respondents are unlikely to be equally distributed. This is what dual system enumeration mentioned in our article is about, trying to plug in the gaps. Triple system enumeration which our article doesn't explain that well but I assume means combining administrative records with the other data might seem to be even better, but our article briefly discusses why it isn't easy to do. (I don't know if it's still true no one has ever done it. I don't know if 2018 in NZ really counts since it wasn't planned and I think the use of administrative records might have been limited but I'd hardly be surprised if our article is out of date or maybe the claim was never true when written.) And here we're just talking about combining records from the census with administrative ones rather then relying on them as the sole source. Nil Einne (talk) 04:12, 7 February 2024 (UTC)

Thanks. With that in mind, I started to think about some combined methodology, e.g. electronically counting both permanent residency permits and associated birth certificates, and for those underage persons without ID documents - listed as family members in passports or elsewhere, if available. While still prone to underestimation, the related data may still be more reliable than going from house to house, it seems. 212.180.235.46 (talk) 10:13, 7 February 2024 (UTC)

Going from house to house is to determine how many are actually there. In my American census for 2020, they asked how many people were living at my address on April 1. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 11:37, 7 February 2024 (UTC)

And to add to this, the point of a census is not only to get a general population count, but to do so with a degree of granularity that is useful for all sorts of planning purposes. For that, you not only need to know how many people there are, but where they live exactly, their age distribution, where they work, how often they move and where, what their income level is, etc. While the population count is often the most publicized result of a census, it's far from the most useful piece of data gathered. Xuxl (talk) 16:29, 7 February 2024 (UTC)

The preferred term used by the United Nations and many countries is "population and housing census", since a key objective is information about household arrangements, conditions, and resources. In the UK they ask what type of central heating you have. In Ghana they ask about your source of water. In most countries they ask at least about tenure and number of rooms, and how everyone is related (or not) to each other. You can't always reliably get this stuff elsewhere. -- zzuuzz ^(talk) 18:19, 7 February 2024 (UTC)