The challenges of digitization in the Population and Housing Census 2024
This time -unlike the failed 2017 Census-, the population count will be executed over a period of 3 months and will be applied through digital instruments.
Although the digital application of the questionnaire is a novelty for the Population and Housing Census, this mechanism is not new in the use of surveys. The Casen 2022, for example, was also applied via digital instruments.
Sergio Toro, senior researcher at the Millennium Millennium Institute for Data Foundation (IMFD) and the Millennium Millennium Institute for Digital Inequalities and Opportunities (NUDOS ), who was part of the panel of experts to design, implement and evaluate the Casen 2022 Survey, explains that in this type of digital instruments "there is a program that allows you or the interviewer to mark the questionnaires and this finally centralizes everything in one place".
In this sense, the academic adds that digital questionnaires are very different from paper questionnaires: "In paper questionnaires, for example, you had to read the options and sometimes an option made you jump to another question, but now digital questionnaires allow you to make that jump by programming".
Digitization of the application
Another novelty of this process is the possibility of digitally self-censoring in case the census takers do not find People in the household. However, Sergio has several questions about the possibility of self-censoring. "Not only is there no longer a professional census taker, but also you don't know who is answering that particular code of the dwelling, because it is not a particular code of the person. Therefore, it can be answered by anyone and can lend itself to erroneous answers". He adds: "What happens if the person who receives this is a person with little digital skills, generally older groups, rural groups, etc. Will they manage to make this entry? because most of them have to do the digital census via telephone because they do not have a fixed Internet network, they do not have computers, but simply telephones".
According to the Digital Inclusion Study 2023 prepared by the alternate director of NUDOS, Teresa Correa, and the main researcher of the Imhay Millennium Nucleus, Isabel Pavez, People from rural areas and older age groups experience significant difficulties in understanding digital media. "The big problem of digital deployment, understanding that we are trying to move towards an electronic government, is to understand who can participate in it and thus the biases that are generated due to the inability of some People to develop this process in digital terms," says Sergio.
"What is at stake here is to know how much deployment the State has in person and how much is finally left to digital deployment", concludes the academic.