To the Readers of the thematic census issue
The 15th population census of Hungary is behind us. In October 2011, nearly 40 thousand enumerators visited more than 4 million dwellings in order to collect data on the demographic, educational and employment characteristics, ethnic and religious affiliation, health status of the population in Hungary as well as on the housing conditions. The census was completed successfully, the processing of data was finished and the results have been continuously published.
A census is always a demanding but wonderful task. There are no two identical censuses; the world is changing so much in ten years that each occasion is a new challenge. The social environment is changing, a new focus is given to data needs, and the attitude of the population towards data collections is also changing, as we well know, not in a direction favourable for surveys. Meanwhile, the technical environment is also changing, the development allows for applying new methods but requires at the same time to adapt to the modern technologies well established in everyday life.
The 2011 census has brought especially many novelties. This was our first census which we conducted as a member state of the European Union in accordance with mandatory regulations. Several methodological innovations were applied specifically adapted to the domestic conditions. The most important of them was the possibility for completing the questionnaires via internet, which was applied in many countries, similarly to Hungary, for the first time in the history of censuses. We worked for the first time with geocoded address data which allowed for the automation of creating the enumeration districts. The monitoring of the progress in the multi-channel data collection and the registration of the participants were helped by an electronic monitoring system. We already had experiences in data processing on the basis of optical character recognition from ten years ago, but the technical development opened new ways in the automation of processes.
The participation of non-governmental organisations and the research community in our work was more pronounced than ever before. We received important support from them in the development of questionnaires, the campaigns promoting the census and in the publication of most useful data as well.
This thematic issue certainly cannot undertake to describe in details the methodological background of the census and to give extensive information about all important social changes reflected in the data. However, it tries to give a comprehensive picture about the 2011 census as far as possible: it presents the methodological foundations and the international environment, as well as the most important results and, in some key topics, it analyses the data in details. However, this is only the tip of the iceberg. We would like to call the attention of those
interested to the publication series about census data and to the constantly expanding range of information published on our website. Through the census data sets accessible in the Dissemination database of HCSO and the ten percent microdata file which will soon be available in the Research room of HCSO, the use of the data according to individual needs is possible from 2014. We would like to ensure the widest possible access to the results since the real success of our work is if the statistical data collected during the census are used by many people in many ways.
Gabriella Vukovich President of the Hungarian Central Statistical Office
