The challenges of digitization in the Census 2024

A census by law, a logic of trained enumerators and a digital collection of information are the main features of the 2024 Census that began a month ago. “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,” says NUDOS senior researcher Sergio Toro.

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, principal researcher of the Millennium Nucleus on Inequalities and Digital Opportunities (NUDOS) and the Millennium Institute Foundation of Data (IMFD) 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 that makes that finally everything is centralized 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 of the novelties 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 few 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 principal 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”, closes the academic.