Latest developments of the data collection system for the next Italian census pilot Giuseppe Sindoni, Istat, Italy

What’s new for the 2011 Population Census? Use of street numbers in field operations Business and household geocoding to the census tract Use of administrative archives New questionnaire delivery process Personalised questionnaires Mail out New methods and survey techniques Census areas Short and long form Multi-channel collection Flexible organisation network Downsized municipal front-office => Stronger back-office Population-based differentiation Enumerator guidance

Census pilot 25 October 2009 Stratified sample 31 municipalities About 80,000 households About 180,000 people 6 survey schemes to be tested on different types of municipalities

This presentation Architecture of the web-based collection and management system Technical characteristics Demonstration of the online questionnaire

System architecture

Online questionnaire demonstration

The management and monitoring system Aimed at simplifying back-office work Needed to: manage the day-to-day work of enumerators monitor multi-channel data collection

Management and monitoring system (2) Main functions: Census tract status Summary reports Operator management Questionnaire management Documentation

Technical features Three layer architecture RDBMS - application server - browser Model-View-Controller pattern Java Enterprise Edition 5 Servlet + Java Server Pages

Final thoughts Very difficult to assess the right usability issues for the questionnaire The pilot will probably provide a lot of feedback on user satisfaction, from both households and municipal back offices A different census strategy, due to potential budget cut, could completely change the final census scenario