IMPROVING THE QUALITY OF ADMINISTRATIVE REGISTERS

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

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

The modification processes of the two statistics Changes in these areas follows a three-years run; 2013: Registration • 2014: • Data Collection • Processing • Publishing 2012: Planning Family counselling services and Child Welfare Services

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

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

Statistics Norway and the readjusting processes • File description/electronic forms • Checking program • Internal editing system ( e.g. ISEE) • Figures • Reporting guidelines/instructions

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

Challenges – Child Welfare Services • Old categories of measures • The Norwegian letters «ÆØÅ» • ISEE (editing system) had to cope with a hierarchical file structure

Results - Child Welfare Services • A database summarizingmonthlyregister status • Eventually model a new and plausible event history database • The services themselves will revise the errors

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

Better qualityofstatistics 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

Conclusionsaboutquality • Evaluation ofthereadjustmentswith regard to thewell-known «European Statistics Code ofPractice» • Point 12.3: «Revisionsareregularly analyzed in order to improve statisticalprocess» • Our paper is a first steptowardsanalyzingtherevisionprocess

IMPROVING THE QUALITY OF ADMINISTRATIVE REGISTERS