Independent Review of Coverage Assessment, Adjustment and Quality Assurance

An independent review team, lead by Professor Ian Plewis from the University of Manchester, has published a review of methods for coverage assessment, coverage adjustment and quality assurance of the 2011 Census population estimates for England and Wales. The review, and all supporting documentation are available to download.

ONS responded to the recommendations in the following working papers, available to download:

• Adjusting for Within Household Dependence – testing the assumption that within household dependence would be minimal due to the CCS design

• Estimating and Correcting for Over-count in the 2011 Census – presenting a small simulation study to demonstrate the chosen method

• Estimation and Adjustment for Communal Establishments in the 2011 Census – outlining proposed methods for measuring coverage in large and small communal establishments

• Coverage Adjustment Methodology for the 2011 Census – describing building on the 2001 imputation system

• Age Sex Groups for use in Estimation – using age groups with homogeneous census coverage probabilities to reduce heterogeneity bias

• The Use of Fixed Effects When Estimating for Individual Local Authorities – describing the need for and when to use a fixed effects estimator

• Variance Estimation – outlining methods for estimating variance and deriving confidence intervals for the 2011 Census