A Census form was delivered to every household, establishment, or to people living anywhere else, by a field force set up throughout the country.
The forms were designed for self-completion by form-fillers and to provide information which related to Census day - 29 April 2001. Most forms were then posted back to temporary local offices and the remainder collected by the field force. Click HERE to view a Census form for a household in England, and other forms which were used.
The form for a household in England asked questions which collected information on household accommodation, relationship, demographic characteristics (e.g. sex, age, marital status), migration, cultural characteristics, health and provision of care, qualifications, employment, workplace and journey to work. In Wales there was an additional question on the Welsh language. The forms for people who lived communaly such as homes for the elderly, collected only information on each person.
There was a legal obligation on everyone to complete a Census form, and a limited number of people have been prosecuted for failing to comply with this obligation. There was also a major publicity campaign to make people aware that a Census was being taken and why the Census information is important. There was also a special programme to help various groups who might have difficulty with the Census.
The 2001 Census forms were designed to be fed at high speed through scanning machinery which captures all the ticked responses and holds written answers in digital forms. The latter are coded into categories either by automatic systems which recognise terms given in response to questions, or by manual coding. The capture of data for some 60 million people and 24 million households in the UK is scheduled to take around 10 months from a start in June 2001. Once information from the forms has been electronically captured, the paper forms will be pulped and recycled, but the digital images will be transferred to microfilm to be made available as public records after 100 years.
The data capture processes have been contracted out by the Census organisations, but the further processes which take place before there is a database from which results can be drawn are carried out by the Census organisations. The main phases are:
'edits' to ensure that data are consistent;
'imputation' to insert the best estimate of a missing response;
statistical adjustment to allow for any shortfall detected in a follow up survey of Census coverage;
management of data quality throughout; and finally,
high speed tabulation software produces aggregate statistics from the output database of individual records for delivery to users in print or electronic form.
Once the information has been captured from the form and processed into a database from which statistics can be prepared, simple figures such as the total number of people living in a place are prepared on every topic. But the great value of this 'snapshot' of the population, is that combinations of circumstances - such as numbers of single parents with young children living in the upper stories of high rise housing - are recognised and figures produced.
Each stage of the Census planning, field and processing operations is being evaluated and reported in a series of notes are being published on our Website. Click HERE for more information.
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