The French new rolling census

Abstract

To answer the increasing demand for improved timeliness of data and spread the work involved in conducting the census over a longer period, the French National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies has put in place a programme to redesign the census, based on the “rolling census concept” proposed by L. Kish. In this rolling census, every commune below the 10 000 inhabitants threshold will be surveyed once within a five year period; larger communes will be split off into five rotation groups of addresses, each rotation group being surveyed in one of the five years. This paper presents the principles and the methodology of this operation and the situation at the end of 2004.