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IMPROVING THE QUALITY OF ADMINISTRATIVE REGISTERS

BETTER SOCIAL WELFARE STATISTICS?

Vibeke Sky (vis@ssb.no) Unni Beate Grebstad (ugr@ssb.no)

Division for Social Welfare Statistics

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Reasons for adjustments

• Changes in the Social Welfare Services

• To provide the Public Administration with relevant, complete as well as accurate statistics

• Political decision-making in regard to social policy; dependent on good statistics

• Adjustments are usually necessary every 5th year

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The modification processes of the two statistics

Changes in these areas follows a three-years run;

2012:Planning

2013: Registration

2014:• Data Collection • Processing • Publishing

Family counselling services and Child Welfare Services

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Family counselling services and Mediation for parents

The purpose of the alteration:• Relevance • Quality • Prepare automatically extraction of man-years from

registers• Cost effectiveness• Non-excessive reporting burden

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Child Welfare Services statistics

Why alteration?• New categories of measures the last 5 years• Need for good time-series must be held against the

need for change• Coherence and comparability• Longitudinal data for researchers • Easing the task burden

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Statistics Norway and the readjusting processes

• File description/electronic forms• Checking program• Internal editing system ( e.g. ISEE)• Figures • Reporting guidelines/instructions

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Challenges; Family counselling

• Relevant legislation

• Users needs (Directorate for Children, Youth and Family Affairs)

• Time series vs. change

• Extracting man-years from registers

Results: Family counselling

• Increasing the relevance of the statistics (e.g. statistics on groups, children's participation)

• Increase the quality of statistics on man-years*

• More effective and less resource-draining data collection and processing of data

*Contracted man-years adjusted for long term leaves

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Challenges – Child Welfare Services

• Old categories of measures

• The Norwegian letters «ÆØÅ»

• ISEE (editing system) had to cope with a hierarchical file structure

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Results - Child Welfare Services

• A database summarizing monthly register status

• Eventually model a new and plausible event history database

• The services themselves will revise the errors

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Better quality in Child Welfare Data?

• We will publish some new and more relevant variables (e.g.notifications, measures involving other services)

• Better opportunities for analysis through more dynamic data for researchers

• New and updated statistics

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Better quality of statistics on family counselling services and mediations?

• A more updated statistical picture of the services

• Increased focus on children and group therapy

• More stable and thus more reliable data capture of man-years from register

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Conclusions about quality

• Evaluation of the readjustments with regard to the well-known «European Statistics Code of Practice»

• Point 12.3: «Revisions are regularly analyzed in order to improve statistical process»

• Our paper is a first step towards analyzing the revision process