Quality of National Records of Scotland (NRS) Data on Vital Events

Introduction

National Records of Scotland's (NRS's) approach to ensuring the quality of its statistics covers the kinds of issues that are identified in the Guide to Basic Quality Assurance in Statistics which was produced and published by the Scottish Government (SG). That document starts by stating that:

• The production of high quality statistics is a fundamental priority for all members of the statistician group. There are frequent and important statements about quality in the Code of Practice for Official Statistics and these are picked up in the National Statistician’s guidance on Quality on the UK Statistics Authority’s website. These are clear about the requirement on those producing official statistics to ensure that quality is monitored and assured.
• The definition of Quality as relevant to Official Statistics is necessarily broad and covers relevance, accuracy, timeliness and punctuality, accessibility and clarity, comparability, and coherence.

The body of the SG Guide consists of five sections, providing guidance on a number of aspects of the quality assurance of statistics.

The following are examples of how NRS's arrangements for the quality assurance of its statistics of Vital Events deal with the kinds of points covered by the SG Guide:

• planning of data quality assurance (section 1 of the SG Guide) - NRS's internal working timetables for the finalisation of the data for a calendar year, and for the production of each publication, include provision for checking (e.g.) the quality of the underlying data and the accuracy of the figures which are given in each publication;
• basic checks, is the dataset fit for purpose, and checking changes over time (sections 2 to 4 of the SG Guide) - the links below provide access to pages which provide information about:
  • Quality of the data obtained from the registration of births, stillbirths, marriages, civil partnerships and deaths. 
    (Adobe Acrobat Portable Document Format (PDF) 94 Kb)
  • Checking the quality of National Records of Scotland (NRS) statistical data on vital events.  (PDF 92 Kb)
  • The potential unreliability of figures for small areas, for short periods or for particular sub-groups. Several examples of this can be found in a section of our website on fluctuations in death statistics, particularly when the numbers involved are small. Similar points apply in the case of statistics for other types of Vital Event for small areas, short periods or particular sub-groups.

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• explaining changes and discontinuities (section 5 of the SG Guide) - material is added to this Web site as and when appropriate, such as the pages on:
  • the revision of the historical series of divorce statistics and  
  • the change in the standard basis for the figures for 'drugs reported' (refer to paragraphs 2.3 to 2.7).

More detailed information about the 'Quality of NRS Data on Deaths' is available from our website.