Checklist for the Quality Evaluation of Administrative Data Sources

National statistics offices are increasingly using administrative and other secondary data sources for the production of statistics. This approach makes them highly dependent on the quality of those sources. It is therefore of vital importance that a procedure is available to determine the quality of such data sources in a systematic, objective, and standardized way. For this purpose Statistics Netherlands have developed a quality framework and a checklist. The checklist aims to minimize the effort and time required for evaluation. In this paper the quality framework, the checklist, its application, and the evaluation results obtained are discussed.

The framework distinguishes three different views on quality, namely the Source view, the Metadata view, and the Data view. The Source view focuses on quality aspects essential for the delivery of the data source, whereas the Metadata view focuses on the metadata aspects of the data source. In the Data view technical and accuracy related aspects of data quality are studied. By means of a checklist the quality indicators of the Source and Metadata part of the framework are determined. The Data view is not included.