STATIN To Roll Out National Population And Housing Census In April

The Statistical Institute of Jamaica (STATIN) is slated to undertake Jamaica’s 15th National Population and Housing Census in April.

The national census is conducted every 10 years and was scheduled for 2021 but was postponed due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.

Speaking on JIS Television’s Get the Facts Programme, Director-General of STATIN Carol Coy, says data collected from citizens will include age, sex, marital status, education attainment, religious affiliation, household composition, family characteristics, and household size.

“[We] need to look at the housing stock to see how Jamaicans are living… their access to electricity, their access to water, their access to garbage collection, and which showed up during the pandemic, was our access to internet,” Ms. Coy states.

“You would have realised that … a significant number of children didn’t have access to internet, and so it’s a census that will give you this detailed information as to what is happening,” she adds.

Ms. Coy tells JIS that the census will target every Jamaican, whether they live in private households, institutions – including prisons, or on the streets.

She also informs that STATIN will be facilitating online training for nearly 10,000 persons who will be assisting with the process.

“We will be providing our interviewers with masks, sanitisers, and so what we’ll be following is the protocol from the Ministry of Health and Wellness. What we hope is that most persons would have gotten vaccinated, or a significant portion of persons would have gotten vaccinated by then to make the process much easier,” Ms. Coy states.

The Director-General, however, stresses that being vaccinated is not a requirement to be recruited as an interviewer.

“We follow the Government of Jamaica guideline and the Jamaican Government has not mandated vaccination, so we cannot do that for the census. We have not started but the recruitment will be done online. So, persons will have to apply on the STATIN website and they will have to do a pre-employment test online,” Ms. Coy says, adding that this is the first census that will be undertaken using tablets.

The Director-General states that the information collected during the census will be treated confidentially by STATIN.

She explains that STATIN operates under the Statistics Act, noting that the Act makes it very clear that the Agency cannot use or release any information to anyone else, whether it’s government or the private sector.

“Your information is confidential, we can only release information at a level that will not let persons identify who you are. One of the critical areas is disability and we only release that, at say at a parish level and the reason we only release that at a parish level is so that persons will not be able to identify persons in a community,” Ms. Coy explains.

“We will be using tablets, and that, again is an area of concern. So, the data is encrypted, we can shut down the tablets if they are stolen. The information gets to STATIN once its uploaded. Once the data collectors gather that information in the field, it’s uploaded and comes to our servers, and it’s now no longer on the tablet. So these are [measures] that we have put in place to ensure the confidentiality and STATIN has been operating for over 70 years and we have never breached this part of our mandate,” she adds.

She further states that the interviewers and supervisors will have identification from STATIN, and “we will also have a system where you can go to our website, put in the person’s name, and you can verify that the person is actually from STATIN.”

The Director-General also informs that the Agency is in the process of getting a toll-free number where persons can call.

Meanwhile, Ms. Coy is encouraging citizens to participate in the census, as the information collected is critical.

“We complain that we’re not getting certain facilities, but it’s only when governments have this data or the private businesses have this information that they can provide for you,” she states.

Data collection under the census is expected to be carried out over a four-month period.