Accuracy and reliability of data collected using census questions

This paper reports on the results of a study conducted in the Agincourt Health and Demographic Surveillance Site in 2009. A special round,of fieldwork, using fieldworkers who had not been involved in fieldwork of the DSS, was implemented in which census-type questions were asked of respondents (and via them, of other household members). The study had three principal goals: First, to evaluate and measure the errors in reponses to those census-type questions when benchmarked against the longitudinally-collected portraits collected over approximately 15 years, differentially by respondents and respondents reporting on other household members. A second intention of the study was to compare the results from a variety of indirect estimation techniques with the directly-observed estimates reconstructed from the DSS data. Doing so would provide insight into how well the techniques work. The final goal of the project was to find ways of improving those techniques that did not reliably capture the underlying demographc trend so that they might be improved upon.

The current paper will report on the findings related to the first, and (probably) the second, goals outlined above.