Australian Bureau of Statistics
Celebrating the International Year of Statistics 2013

ABOUT THE MICRODATA

The survey microdata are released under the provisions of the Census and Statistics Act 1905. This Act allows for the release of data in the form of unit records where the information is not likely to enable the identification of a particular person or organisation. Accordingly, there are no names or addresses of survey respondents on the CURFs, and other steps have been taken to protect the confidentiality of respondents. These include:

• reducing the level of detail shown for some items (eg geography, industry and occupation items);
• ranging, collapsing or top- or bottom-coding some data items (eg age first time consulted with a health professional); and
• changing characteristics for some records (eg masking information by changing demographic details for a small number of records).

To further assist in protecting the confidentiality of unit record data, all dollar values have been perturbed (Expanded CURF) or are presented in deciles only (Basic and Expanded CURFs). That is, each value has been adjusted up or down by a small, random amount. Also, for each of these items, each value above or below a certain cut-off limit has been set to the mean of all the values above or below the cut-off limit.

Steps to confidentialise the data available on the CURFs are taken in such a way as to maximise the usefulness of the content while maintaining the confidentiality of respondents to ABS statistical collections. As a result, it may not be possible to exactly reconcile all the statistics produced from the CURFs with published statistics.

Intending purchasers should ensure that the data they require, at the level of detail they require, are available on the CURFs. Data collected in the survey but not contained on the CURFs may be available on request in tabulated form.

Previous Page

Next Page