The Politics of Method: Taming the New, Making Data Official

Statisticians are under pressure to innovate, partly due to shrinking budgets and the call to do more with less, but also due to technological advances and emergence of new actors promising to produce more accurate and timely statistics with what has come to be known as “big data”. This raises the question, how do new forms of data and methods become legitimate and official? We approach this question by conceiving of official statistics as part of a transnational field in which different factions of actors compete and struggle over the authority to innovate the data and methods that are legitimated to produce official statistics. We consider these struggles as a politics of method that is not reducible to a competition between ideas and words. They are also material insofar as they feature competing digital devices mobilised to demonstrate the validity of new data and methods. Through two empirical examples, we identify the strategy of reassembling methods to capture how statisticians tame and contain innovations based on big data, especially those introduced by data scientists, by integrating and simultaneously subordinating them to existing methods. By doing so, we suggest that reassembling is an innovation strategy that secures the relative position of national and international statisticians within the transnational field of statistics

Microdataset of Social Statistics for Development of Microsimulation Model, 2010

Microdataset of Social Statistics for Development of Microsimulation Model 2010 was prepared by the Statistical Office of the Republic of Slovenia for the needs of the development of microsimulation model for modeling effects of tax legislation changes, social transfers changes and health legislation changes. The simple random sample includes 120.046 persons. It consists of data which are merged from several data collections, mostly for 2010 (e.g. unemployed, income tax, benefits, students) and some for 2011 (e.g. real estate, Register Census) and 2012 (scholarships). The administrative data used originate from various administrative sources of institutions of the Republic of Slovenia, such us Ministry of the Interior, The Surveying and Mapping Authority, Ministry of Labour, Family and Social affairs, Tax Administration, Pension and Disability Insurance Institute, Employment Service, Healthcare Institute and Health Insurance Institute. In addition to that, statistical register and statistical research data of the Statistical Office were used.Microdataset of Social Statistics for Development of Microsimulation Model 2010 was prepared by the Statistical Office of the Republic of Slovenia for the needs of the development of microsimulation model for modeling effects of tax legislation changes, social transfers changes and health legislation changes. The simple random sample includes 120.046 persons. It consists of data which are merged from several data collections, mostly for 2010 (e.g. unemployed, income tax, benefits, students) and some for 2011 (e.g. real estate, Register Census) and 2012 (scholarships). The administrative data used originate from various administrative sources of institutions of the Republic of Slovenia, such us Ministry of the Interior, The Surveying and Mapping Authority, Ministry of Labour, Family and Social affairs, Tax Administration, Pension and Disability Insurance Institute, Employment Service, Healthcare Institute and Health Insurance Institute. In addition to that, statistical register and statistical research data of the Statistical Office were used

Eiropas Savienibas kandidatvalstu statistiskais biletens, 2002

In 2 partsAvailable from Latvian Academic Library / LAL - Latvian Academic LibrarySIGLELVLatvi

Eiropas Savienibas kandidatvalstu statistiskais biletens, 2003/4

Available from Latvian Academic Library / LAL - Latvian Academic LibrarySIGLELVLatvi