Always an open ear: the census information services
Since 9 May 2011, many respondents in Germany have been questioned by the relevant statistical offices of the Länder in the 2011 Census. Are you one of the roughly 17 million owners of a dwelling? Or do you belong to the 10 % of the citizens who were asked for information in the household survey? Perhaps you provided information in the survey in residential establishments and collective living quarters? Or maybe you just wanted to get information on the modern population census before or during the collection phase.
Then you might be one of the 2.4 million people who called the statistical offices of the Federation and the Länder between October 2010 and April 2012 to ask for information. “Some of the phones just didn’t stop ringing
”, Ralf Müller of the info service of the Federal Statistical Office remembers. Of course, around the reference date 9 May 2011, many citizens wished to get information about the census or needed help in completing the questionnaires. But many people contacted us for other reasons. “Some respondents just lost their questionnaire or it had become unusable through some accident,
” Ralf Müller recalls. “Some stories told about such incidents brought a little diversion in those bustling days. But then the statistical offices of the Länder sent new questionnaires to all those people,
” said Ralf Müller.
Here is another interesting figure: about 290,000 written enquiries were answered by the statistical offices between October 2010 and April 2012. At peak times, the information teams hardly left their keyboards. Some citizens just did not believe that we answered all those requests even on weekends. Daniela Hartmann of the census communication team of the Federal Statistical Office well remembers those times: “Some respondents wondered whether the letter they had received was a fake, so they asked us. Then we answered by e-mail on a weekend, and some people thought this proved that the letter had to be a fake because there are not many authorities working on weekends.
”
Work has returned to normal in the information services because the data collection phase was finished in mid-2012. Now all collected data are checked for plausibility, processed, evaluated and prepared for release in spring 2013.
