Census
Channel: 宇宙のすべての知識 プリンシピア
Date: 2019-02-01

Census, by Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6889 / CC BY SA 3.0

#Censuses
#Genealogy
#Population
#Survey_methodology
#Sampling_(statistics)
#Latin_words_and_phrases
Census

A census is the procedure of systematically acquiring and recording information about the members of a given population. The term is used mostly in connection with national population and housing censuses; other common censuses include agriculture, business, and traffic censuses. The United Nations defines the essential features of population and housing censuses as "individual enumeration, universality within a defined territory, simultaneity and defined periodicity", and recommends that population censuses be taken at least every 10 years. United Nations recommendations also cover census topics to be collected, official definitions, classifications and other useful information to co-ordinate international practice.

The word is of Latin origin: during the Roman Republic, the census was a list that kept track of all adult males fit for military service. The modern census is essential to international comparisons of any kind of statistics, and censuses collect data on many attributes of a population, not just how many people there are. Censuses typically began as the only method of collecting national demographic data, and are now part of a larger system of different surveys. Although population estimates remain an important function of a census, including exactly the geographic distribution of the population, statistics can be produced about combinations of attributes e.g. education by age and sex in different regions. Current administrative data systems allow for other approaches to enumeration with the same level of detail but raise concerns about privacy and the possibility of biasing estimates.

A census can be contrasted with sampling in which information is obtained only from a subset of a population; typically main population estimates are updated by such intercensal estimat...