Gabriele Ascari, Giovanna Brancato, Andrea Bruni, Stefano Daddi, Grazia Di Bella, Sara Giavante, Fabiana Rocci, Roberto Sanzo, Anna Maria Sgamba, Giorgia Simeoni, Simona Spirito
Full text of the 7/2023 issue (in Italian)
Over the last few years, Istat has developed the Integrated System of Registers (SIR), which addresses the new trend towards statistics produced from administrative data structured in statistical registers, and integrated with survey data, when necessary.
The SIR is organised into base registers (base populations, e.g. individuals) and satellite registers. The latter aims to organise the information according to specific criteria, which in some cases can be directly linked to the units of the base registers (extended registers) or, in other cases, can represent a focus on given domains (thematic registers). In this context, the need to define a system to measure and assess the quality of the SIR has arisen, concerning both its objects and the relationships among them.
To this aim, a six-month working group was purposely set up at Istat. This document reports the foundations laid down for the quality system, achieved by the working group. The proposed approach is developed along four main lines: the harmonisation of the technical terminology, the adherence to existing international standards, the interoperability with Istat existing systems on metadata and quality, and the anchoring to SIR production processes.
The main results are the systematisation of definitions; the identification of quality indicators integrated into a standard metadata documentation model; the investigation of methodologies for the definition of quality indicators throughout the production process and the mapping of some statistical production processes underlying the SIR registers. Finally, proposals and reflections for future developments aimed at the final implementation of the quality system are also reported, such as the development of further quality indicators, the testing of the indicators on some registers, and the identification of synthetic quality measures.