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Originally Posted by zuluking
Explain to me why the long form census should be mandatory and why it would be undermined by the apparently ubiquitous lazy, illiterate a-holes that will immediately refuse filling it out without the threat of jail time.
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(A) According to the e-mails that were given to the media via the freedom of information act, senior officials at STC estimated that a non-mandatory long form would bring the response rate from about 100% to 50%. If you are getting 50% of the data, you are going to be far less accurate.
(B) As we have seen in the past, if you make something voluntary, we get over/undersampling. That 50% that we would get would generally be from people that are educated enough to see the value of the census and see that it is worthwhile to them and people that have the free time to do it. Retirees. Stay-at-home moms when the kids are off to school. An odd one is that the unemployed often don't respond even though they have the time. They end up in the "undersampled" populations. When I went knocking on doors for an orientation course, we found that the older people were the more likely they were to respond to our questionnaire. Younger people were always on the run from one place to the next and would refuse. So if we are oversampling and undersampling various social groups, we are again devaluing the data.
The reason the Chief Stat resigned was because Clement insinuated that Statistics Canada was on board with saying the data will be as accurate with a voluntary long from as with a mandatory form. As soon as he quit, Dr. Sheik said this was NOT true, no statistical agency in the world would ever make such a claim, and both he and the previous Chief Stat, Dr. Fellegi have said that for the purpose of providing the best most accurate data, we should have a mandatory long form.