Researchers urge changes to StatsCan’s Internet use survey

Statistics Canada’s Internet use survey should undergo some changes to be more effective and timely, said researchers who use the data. According to Statistics Canada’s website, the survey, officially called the Canadian Internet Use Survey, replaced the former Household Internet Use Survey, which ran from 1997 to 2003. The survey was subsequently redesigned to focus more on Internet use by individuals instead of households, Statistics Canada's website says. In 2010, the survey was reworked again to better measure the type and speed of household Internet connections. Statistics Canada says it conducts the survey on a cost-recovery basis on behalf of Industry Canada. Catherine Middleton, the Canada research chair in communication technologies in the information society at Ryerson University, said the speed at which the survey data is released is a problem for researchers, many of whom want more timely access to data such as that of the most recent surveys from 2009 and 2010. The study is an “occasional” survey, according to Statistics Canada, and has been conducted recently for the years 2005, 2007, 2009, 2010, and 2012. The public microdata file for the 2009 survey became available on Statistics Canada’s website on Nov. 23, 2012 and the file for the 2010 survey will be available in March or April of 2013, Monique Doucet, a spokeswoman for Statistics Canada, said in an emailed statement. “You can get summary level information, but to do any more detailed analysis you need access to the full file, which at this point hasn’t been widely available,” Middleton said. “My bigger concern is about access to the data.” Leslie Shade, associate professor at the University of Toronto’s faculty of information, agreed in a phone interview that the speed of the data’s release is a problem for researchers when the Internet and its use is a rapidly changing space. “It is difficult now to be able to generalize from 2012 about applications and services that have been developed and used much more than in 2009,” she said. “So it could be kind of outdated almost by the time the information and data are released.” Shade said the data is “very valuable” as a baseline indicator of how Canadians use the Internet and that it can be useful for policy implementations and program development. Many researchers and organizations rely on the Internet use survey data, including the CRTC, which uses it to validate the results of its annual Communications Monitoring Report. Mark Uhrbach, program manager for digital economy metrics at Statistics Canada, said in a phone interview that Statistics Canada releases detailed results from the survey nine to 10 months after the reference period, “which is actually very quickly compared to surveys of this size at statistical organizations in other countries.” Uhrbach said in a follow-up email that there are many steps that go into preparing data from a large file such as the Internet use survey, and that Statistics Canada has to ensure the data is representative of the Canadian population. “Creating a questionnaire for a survey such as the Canadian Internet Use Survey is always a balance,” Uhrbach said. He noted that the methodology of the survey changed, so that data from 2010 will not be comparable to previous years. The reformatted survey has two parts, one that focuses on the type of Internet connections in a household, and a second part on Canadians' activities online, Uhrbach said. “In 2010, we made that shift into sort of a hybrid model, where we incorporated the household and the individual activities as well,” he said. Uhrbach said the 2012 survey, which is now in the field, is identical to the 2010 questionnaire, and that data from the 2012 survey will be released in October 2013. Statistics Canada confirmed that those results will be an initial, smaller data set. Middleton said the different surveys are still comparable. “Even though it’s not precisely identical, I think looking at a pattern that happened in 2009 and looking at a pattern that happened in 2010 still gives us useful information,” Middleton said. She said the survey should be more adaptable and that Canada needs a more responsive means of collecting the information. “We need to be able to add in new things,” Middleton said. Mobile Internet use is important, she said, but the survey should to go further to measure Canadians' online and digital literacy. “The StatsCan data says, ‘Do you do this or don’t you do it?’ So people say ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ but it doesn’t give us as much information on peoples’ skills,” Middleton said. She said most national surveys measure the hours users spend online but not whether they have the capacity to accomplish complicated tasks. There’s an opportunity to enhance parts of the survey addressing Canada’s digital literacy and the use of new Internet technologies. “Those questions are harder to get at in national statistical surveys, but ultimately I think that’s the sort of data that we need if we tie it back into things like the government's digital strategy consultation,” she said. Uhrbach said by email that any questionnaire used by Statistics Canada undergoes “extensive” testing with focus groups and one-on-one cognitive interviews with potential respondents. “While we would be able to ask more complex or nuanced questions to a small subset of knowledgeable Internet users, our testing has demonstrated that we are not able to ask these questions to a large sample of users,” he said. He said questions in the survey take into account Canadians who recently started using the Internet and those who use it in a limited way. Uhrbach said the questions are also designed to respect the time it takes a respondent to answer the survey. “We do not want to place undue burden on our respondents, and as such, a priority must be placed on each question that makes it onto a questionnaire,” he said. dgrenier@thewirereport.ca

Researchers urge changes to StatsCan’s Internet use survey

News | December 3, 2012

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