Radical
Statistics
Census Information
2) Census fieldwork organisation
Census Area Managers were the top level of temporary fieldwork managers. They were not responsible for any direct collection of census forms, but recruited and supported the District Managers.
Figure 1: Temporary field staff for the 2001 Census in England and Wales Extracted from Census Advisory Group paper (00)05, February 2000
District managers recruited and trained team leaders and enumerators to undertake the census in areas of four to ten thousand households (see Figure 1). District Managers have a good overview of census operations in the field, through their combination of hands-on involvement and responsibility for a substantial area. Some Districts were categorised by the Census offices as likely to be hard to enumerate. They recruited one enumerator for each Enumeration District of 200-400 listed addresses. In all other Districts each enumerator covered two Enumeration Districts of this size.
Figure 2 shows the major landmarks in Census fieldwork and processing. Two features of the plan were to cause specific difficulties. First the separation of delivery into two phases, of 9-20 and 21-27 April, meant that for a large part of April only residents who had been at home during the enumerator's first door-to-door tour of their area had received a census form. Concerned at mounting publicity about the compulsory census in the last week of April, those still without forms understandably but needlessly deluged the national telephone helpline, attempting to request a form that should in any case be delivered within a few days. Second, the ten-day gap between Census day and the return of enumerators to the field proved to be seriously insufficient in most parts of Britain. Enumerators were sent back to addresses from which forms had already been posted. The result was a loss of focus on hard-to-count groups and unexpected expenses for the census operation.
The subcontracting of major parts of the operation is discussed elsewhere in this issue.
