Quality work and conflicting quality objectives

Tim Holt and Tim Jones Office for National Statistics, UK

As official statisticians, quality must be at the heart of all that we do. Today there is so much information, from so many sources and some of it – perhaps most of it – of dubious quality, that the output that official statisticians produce must be recognised as authoritative and of the highest quality. National Statistical Offices devote considerable effort and resource to this aim.

And yet ‘quality’ is not a well-defined concept. It is multi-faceted, and statistics that are regarded by users as having high quality for one purpose may be less adequate for another. Official statistics are often seen as general purpose tools, a single statistic being used for diverse purposes. It is more helpful to think of quality, not as an absolute property of a particular statistic but as a changing property depending on the use to which the statistic is put.

Just as quality is multi-faceted, so are the mechanisms that we, as official statisticians, use to achieve it. No single delivery mechanism or management process can produce statistics of adequate quality for all purposes. We use various inputs from high level office-wide initiatives, from the contributions of specialists for example through methodological programmes, and not least, from the contribution of individual staff members engaged in the ongoing operational work. Quality improvement can come as the result of large or small initiatives and all are important.

The fact that quality is multi-faceted carries with it the seeds of conflict. Inevitably there are trade-offs that must be made. These can cause a lack of confidence for public users and need to be treated by engaging users in the issues.

The paper is in three further sections. The next section sets out to describe the various facets of quality in official statistics, and the third sets out the ways in which the ONS tries to deliver it. The final section describes some of the conflicts that arise between different facets of quality.

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This page last updated: 15 May 2000