Statistics South Africa embarked on a process of revising the General Household Survey (GHS) in August 2008 in order to improve the quality of our product and better meet the needs of our users. During the first phase of the revision the questionnaire was updated and adjusted after extensive consultation. The revised questionnaire was used for the first time in the field during the period July to September 2009.
As part of the on-going revision process, the historical data for the period 2002 to 2007 was also re-weighted. This was necessary because the demographic data used for benchmarking has changed significantly after the release of the findings of the Community Survey in 2007 and the release of new statistics on HIV and AIDS infection rates in the country.
There was also a need to incorporate the provincial boundary changes effected in December 2005 into the re-weighting process. Even though the revised historical data sets were due for release with the GHS 2008 data sets, it was decided to withhold the data for a few months longer as we would like to further refine our re-weighting procedures.
More specifically Statistics South Africa would like to develop new benchmarking systems for the household based data sets using population estimates for households in South Africa. We would also like to impute missing data values for our calibration variables (sex, age and population group), as the new calibration methods exclude records with missing values for any one of these key variables.
Statistics South Africa is therefore planning to postpone the release of the revised 2002-2008 datasets to coincide with the release of the GHS 2009 report, which is currently scheduled for March 2010. At that time the GHS 2008 report will also be replaced, as the information contained in the present version will no longer correspond with the revised datasets.
Issued by: Statistics South Africa
4 November 2009
Source: Statistics South Africa (http://www.statssa.gov.za)
