An important quality aspect of official statistics produced by national
statistical institutes is comparability over time. To maintain uninterrupted
time series, surveys conducted by national statistical institutes are often
kept unchanged as long as possible. To improve the quality or efficiency of a
survey process, however, it remains inevitable to adjust methods or redesign
this process from time to time. Adjustments in the survey process generally
affect survey characteristics such as response bias and therefore have a
systematic effect on the parameter estimates of a sample survey. Therefore, it
is important that the effects of a survey redesign on the estimated series are
explained and quantified. In this paper a structural time series model is
applied to estimate discontinuities in series of the Dutch survey on social
participation and environmental consciousness due to a redesign of the
underlying survey process.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/09-AOAS305 the Annals of
Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of
Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org