New Zealanders have become reluctant to participate in statistical surveys, raising reliability questions for a range of economic data as well as the five-yearly census, the nation’s chief statistician said.
(Bloomberg) — New Zealanders have become reluctant to participate in statistical surveys, raising reliability questions for a range of economic data as well as the five-yearly census, the nation’s chief statistician said.
The response rate to surveys of households has dropped to around 60% from 80% or more in the past, Government Statistician Mark Sowden said in an interview Thursday in Wellington. His collectors report around one-in-five households won’t even answer the door when they knock even though it’s apparent someone is inside, he said.
“New Zealanders just don’t seem to welcome people coming to their door and asking them questions,” Sowden said. “Whether that’s an anti-stats thing, an anti-government thing, an anti-stranger thing, we just don’t know. But what we do know is it’s getting hard.”
Reliability of statistical data is crucial for policymaking. Statistics New Zealand’s quarterly labor market survey generates readings on the jobless rate and wage inflation that feed directly into central bank interest-rate decisions.
Another household economic survey conducted by the agency measures income and savings to help determine child poverty rates, while the population and demographic detail from the census informs government spending on social policy and infrastructure.
As response rates decline, the risk around the reliability of data increases, Sowden said.
The agency is increasingly able to use so-called administrative data gathered by other parts of government — income tax collection, for example, is an indication of employment — and is continually enhancing its use of computer modeling to extrapolate results, he said.
Still, “if we carry on and don’t do anything about our model, and response rates continue to decline, you will get to a point where we might say you can’t publish,” he said. “We’re a distance away from that at the moment. But it’s not an unforeseeable risk.”
Census
The 2023 census collection period has ended with the agency pleased with a provisional response rate of around the 90% target, Sowden said. About 80% of responses were received electronically.
The agency is able to use administrative data to build the response rate on some variables such as the population count to about 97%, which is sufficient to provide a quality final report, he said.
However, for some variables, alternative administrative data isn’t available and quality suffers. An example is the indigenous Maori iwi, or tribe, that people affiliate with, which determines the official Maori population and the boundaries of Maori electorates.
“With the Maori response rate sitting at about 75%, we won’t be able to deliver the quality iwi affiliation data that we would like to because you’ve got no other source of data,” Sowden said.
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