QUALITY DECLARATION - SUMMARY

INSTITUTIONAL ENVIRONMENT

For information on the institutional environment of the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), including the legislative obligations of the ABS, financing and governance arrangements, and mechanisms for scrutiny of ABS operations, please see ABS Institutional Environment.


RELEVANCE

Periodically the ABS conducts individual state specific surveys as part of the Monthly Population Survey (MPS) program. Household Water and Energy Use was the October 2011 State Supplementary Survey topic for Victoria (Vic.).

The survey collected information on household water and energy sources, insulation, energy use, swimming pools and gardens, as well as personal public transport use, all of which have implications for resource use, and by extension pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. As such, survey results may provide a further understanding of the environmental impact of Victorian households and individuals. A breakdown by capital city and balance of state is available in some of the tables within the publication.

The survey reference (or recall) period for individual questions varied, and was up to 12 months in some cases.

Previously, the 2009 State Supplementary Survey - Household Water, Energy Use and Conservation - was conducted during October 2009 in Victoria and collected similar types of information to this survey. Any references to the previous survey are noted in this text as (2009) and are only included where the definitions of categories in both the surveys are similar.

TIMELINESS

The Household Water and Energy Use survey was conducted as a supplement to the monthly Labour Force Survey throughout Victoria during the two weeks commencing 9 October 2011.

ACCURACY

The number of full respondents for the Household Water and Energy Use survey was 4,624 households in Victoria.

The total response rate in Victoria was 89.9%.

Two types of error can occur in estimates that are based on a sample survey: non-sampling error and sampling error. To assist users in understanding the estimate of these errors, relative standard errors (RSEs) are provided for every data cell in tables. For further information please refer to the Technical Note.

COHERENCE

The Household Water and Energy Use survey is not part of the ongoing ABS MPS program. Extreme caution must be used when comparing the 2011 survey with other related publications as different methodologies have been used.

Some comparisons have been made in this publication to data collected in a previous supplementary survey - Household Water, Energy Use and Conservation, Victoria, Oct 2009 (cat. no. 4602.2). Any references to the previous survey are noted in the text as (2009) and are only included where the definitions of categories in both the surveys are similar.

INTERPRETABILITY

Information on terminology and other technical aspects associated with statistics from the 2011 State Supplementary Survey are available. These can be found within the Explanatory Notes, Technical Note and Glossary sections of this publication.

ACCESSIBILITY

Data from the 2011 State Supplementary Survey, Household Water and Energy Use, are available in a variety of formats. The formats available free of charge on the ABS website are:

• main features, which include commentary and graphs
• data cubes which present a variety of data items in 39 tables and 39 RSE tables.