Status of Data Capture Technology in Population and Housing Censuses in the ESCAP region Statistics Division ESCAP

2007 ESCAP Survey on Population and Housing Censuses in Asia and the Pacific

Survey on Population and Housing Censuses in Asia and the Pacific Conducted August 2007; 40 NSOs responded; The following topics were covered:  Project Management Software;  Coding Technologies;  Data Capture Technologies;  Data Entry Verification;  Data Editing and Imputation;  Forms Control Technologies;  Micro Data Technologies;  Cartography/Mapping Technologies;  Publication and Dissemination;  Outsourcing.

Countries which captured data manually in the last census: Afghanistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan Republic, Bhutan, Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, Cook Islands, Malaysia, Marshall Islands, Mongolia, Nepal, Niue, Sri Lanka, Tajikistan

Data capture software used in previous census: OCR/ICR/OMRCOUNTRY OCR or ICR or OMR Australia, Kazakhstan, Lao PDR, Pakistan, Maldives, Thailand, Turkey, Russian Federation, Philippines, Indonesia, Macao - China, OCR/KeyJapan OMR/Key/InternetSingapore Internet / ICRRepublic of Korea IBM smart key system New Zealand

Data capture software to be used in the next census: OCR/ICR/OMRCOUNTRY OCR or ICR or OMRAustralia, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Lao PDR, Pakistan, Macao – China, Malaysia, Maldives, Mongolia, Philippines, Thailand, Turkey, Russian Federation, Sri Lanka OCR/KeyJapan OMR/Key/InternetSingapore Internet / ICRRepublic of Korea IBM smart key system New Zealand

Data Capture Technologies Manual Data Capture 11 Countries will use this in the next census 18 Countries used it in the last census OMR/OCR/ICR Data Capture: 19 countries will be using these automated technologies in the next census. Two others may also. Three of the 19 (Malaysia, Mongolia and Sri Lanka) did not use automated capture in the last census.

Options are to purchase or lease ICR software/system Purchase the ICR equipment and software, the supplier maintains the equipment and software for an agreed period, 3 years for example; Lease the ICR equipment and software, the supplier maintains the equipment and software; In one case leasing turned out to be much cheaper of the two options.

Another option – develop data capture software in-house: Some statistical offices have developed the data capture software in-house, by incorporating character recognition engines such as the ABBYY OCR engine. Other statistical offices have customized vendor supplied ICR software such as FormStorm

In the next census … 11 countries will use a questionnaire posted on the internet. 2 countries will use administrative records. 5 countries will use Computer Assisted Personal Interviews (CAPI) 2 countries will use Computer Assisted Telephone Interviews (CATI)

ESCAP follow-up Survey before this workshop

Maldives 1. What were the Benefits of Using "Smart Form" For data Capture? Certainly there are many benefits of using Smart Form since it captures 99.9 percent of checkboxes and 97 %(in real time it may vary from 90% to 97% depending on the printing of form and handwriting) percent of numerals automatically only verification is required for the captured fields and entry required only for unrecognized fields. By using Smart form production can be increased by 10 times compare to normal data entry. Smart form is developed in VB and it’s really very easy to customize for programmers which is the bottleneck of any other available ICR software. 2. What were the problems that you encounter when using "smart form“ We faced some problem in the design of forms. If you are going to print the forms yourself you must consider the back ground color of the form should be light, there should not be any box or lines near the check boxes and numerals. 3. Are you still planning to use ICR and “Smart Form” in the next Census? It is under consideration, there are pros and cons associated with ICR and Keyboard data entry for a population of 309,500.

Thailand We have used both software: ABBYY and Tele-Form, Tele-Form for Census 2000 and ABBYY for small surveys. The main problems we encounter are that using ABBYY software, there are some steps in ICR process which cannot automatically function. For the next census, we plan to use E- flow.

Benefits and Limitations of using ICR

Benefits of using ICR for data capture (1/2): Results in faster processing of census questionnaire: One country reduced data capture time from 18 months to 8 months while also greatly reducing the number of staff involved in data capture. Another country stated that automated processing was ten times faster than key data entry. Improves accuracy.

Benefits of using ICR for data capture (2/2): Reduces cost of data capture, especially for bigger countries, because less staff and equipment are needed.

Limitations of using ICR for data capture: Special paper has to be used, it is expensive and has to be kept clean and dry by enumerators in the field, otherwise the information has to be rewritten. For some poor small developing countries buying ICR equipment might be relatively more expensive than employing more staff It is difficult to process questionnaire with many pages and big numbers such as establishment surveys using ICR

Thank you!