Page 293 - Contributed Paper Session (CPS) - Volume 7

CPS2103 Helda Curma et al.

Assessing trust in official statistics for
Southeaster European Countries
Helda Curma , Delina Ibrahimaj

Institute of Statistics Albania

Abstract
To ensure the official statistics quality and reliability, the statistical office shall
be guided and follow international agreed principles and methods and try to
build trust in the statistics produced. Every statistical office makes its own
efforts on following the principles of Professional independence, Impartiality,
Objectivity, Reliability, Statistical confidentiality and Cost effectiveness. A very
important issue is to evaluate the trust in official statistics in order to undertake
actions to improve the positioning of the official statistics in society. This paper
has used “OECD - Measuring Trust in Official Statistics Cognitive Testing” as a
conceptual framework. This framework has been built to measure trust among
users of official statistics, while the same principles have been used to make a
self-assessment of the statistical offices regarding trust related factors. The
results of this paper are based on a survey distributed to the 10 statistical
offices (Greece, Bulgaria, Albania, Croatia, Serbia, Kosovo, Turkey,
Montenegro, Macedonia and Bosnia and Hercegovina.

Keywords
Reliability; National Statistical Institutes; Quality; Positioning

Introduction
Trust is a very important aspect of official statistical work. To assess users
and statistical offices opinion regarding the trust in the statistics produced the
conceptual framework of OECD – “Measuring Trust in Official Statistics
Cognitive Testing” is used. This framework has been built to measure trust
among users of official statistics, while the same principles have been used to
make a self-assessment of the statistical offices regarding trust related factors.
The National Statistical Offices Survey was a web-based questionnaire
prepared in English and contained seven questions. The questionnaire
collected information regarding:
 the perception of statistical offices about public confidence in official
statistics from the standpoint of the statistical offices themselves and
the perception of users;
 the assistance provided by different national/international
organisations received for infrastructure, statistical production and
organisational behaviour;

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