The quality requirements for official statistics are described in Section 5 of the Statistics Act and the European Statistics Code of Practice (Eurostat, 2017).
This report shows that compliance with the quality requirements has improved since last year’s report. All producers of official statistics have worked on improvement measures based on the recommendations in last year’s report. A number of measures are planned, in progress or already implemented. This has led to improvements in several of the areas highlighted in last year’s report. The written documentation of the statistics has seen a particular improvement and is more accessible.
The quality report’s most important source of information is the annual quality evaluation of all producers of statistics. This is documented in a separate report: Quality evaluation of official statistics, 2023 (SSB, 2023b). The quality evaluation process, including a questionnaire and follow-up interview at institutional level about compliance with the quality requirements has helped raise awareness of the quality principles. This in itself is positive.
More information was collected in the quality evaluation this year in order to provide a better basis for assessing compliance with key quality principles. This applies to, inter alia, information about user contact and the use of indicators to measure quality in the production of official statistics.
The quality evaluation shows that the producers at institutional level largely meet the quality requirements. In order to provide a better picture of the quality at statistical level, additional information is needed from the producers of official statistics. Collecting and documenting quality information at statistical level will be an area of development in the Norwegian statistical system going forward.