Conferences

Social change since 2001 and the need to capture more information about short-term migrants have led to new question content and changes to the enumeration base for the 2011 UK Census. These changes have impacted on the data collection requirements for the Census Coverage Survey (CCS) which will take place approximately six weeks after the Census. The 2011 CCS will need a questionnaire that can accommodate the question content changes, and gather basic data on visitors and short term migrants, as well as usual residents. In addition, the 2011 CCS will need to collect data about the previous address of households who have moved since Census day. This has presented the challenge of designing a questionnaire that is flexible enough to collect data about the current address of continuously resident respondents as well as data about the previous address from households who have moved. The CCS is an interviewer administered survey, involving a short doorstep interview. Thus any additional requirements need to be incorporated within this basic design. This paper reports on the iterative development of the UK 2009 Rehearsal CCS questionnaire to meet these challenges. In particular, it will detail how the challenges associated with the additional requirements were assessed via three waves of cognitive interviewing and ongoing consultation and collaboration with data analysis and field operation teams.