It analysed the quality of the dataset to get a comprehensive picture of its quality
Statistics New Zealand has released the highlights of the 2018 Census of Population and Dwellings, which was held on March 6.
Stats NZ combined data from the census forms with administrative data to create the 2018 Census dataset, which meets the agency’s quality criteria for population structure information.
The report touched upon night population count and usually resident population count but excluded overseas visitors and Kiwis who are temporarily overseas. The night population count included people in the country on a given census night while the usually resident population count included the number of people who usually live in and were present in the country on census night.
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The report revealed that there were 27.8% households who owned or partly owned their private dwellings and made mortgage payments while 18.8% owned or partly owned their homes but did not make mortgage payments.
Of those whose dwelling was not owned or held in a family trust, 31.9% paid rent while 3.4% lived rent-free. Of those who paid rent, 83.5% rented from a private person, trust, or business while 0.3% rented from an iwi, hapū, or Māori land trust.
Moreover, 91.9% of households in occupied private dwellings had access to a cell phone while 86.1% had access to the Internet.
However, Stats NZ warned that its quality assessment found some of its data to be poor or very poor. Those that were considered very poor quality and therefore not available in the census total by topic tables included families and households, iwi affiliation, and absentees.
The agency is now looking for a way to improve the information for families and households and is still working with the Data Iwi Leaders Group to improve the data quality of its iwi affiliation variable.
