Principles of Design and Appraisal of Statistical Information Systems

Abstract

Our purpose here is to set forth certain principles for the design and appraisal of statistical information systems which describe economic and social organizations and their environments-households, industrial and commercial firms. governments. As such we are primarily concerned with the evaluation of systematic procedures for producing descriptive statistics in and of organizations; we concentrate attention on Federal statistics, though the principles are not limited to this field of application. This is a broad area to which the disciplines of probability and mathematical statistics have made significant contributions for more than two centuries-theoretical contributions which have been regularly tested by experience. There is, therefore, little need to expound on the secure but limited contributions of the principles of probability sampling, statistical inference, and experimental design to the area of descriptive statistics. In actual fact, it is easy to show that descriptive statistics (of economic and social organizations) also involve certain issues of system compatibility and complexity which are not customary topics in probability and mathematical statistics. Some of the issues may be quickly illustrated in terms of a statistical allegory: one is handed a copy of the very valuable Statistical Abstract of the United States, published by the Bureau of the Census on behalf of the statistical agencies of the Federal Government, and is asked to explain how the various tables might be rationally fitted together into coherent and consistent components of one or more information systems. The problem here is not whether rational processes of administration led to the production of a given set of statistical tables, since this can be readily established in almost all cases. The characteristic problem is rather one of the following character: given the basic properties of the data underlying the tables, which have been supplied by a number of statistical reporting systems of one or more governmental agencies (Federal, state, or local), do there exist one or more conceptual frameworks or models which would systematically organize and interrelate the whole set of statistical tables belonging to a well-defined subject matter field in a constructive way; in such a subject matter field, do there exist feasible methods of transformation for reconciling one statistical table with another statistical table? As a case in point, how does one transform a frequency distribution of consumer income based on a sample survey of households into a frequency distribution of taxable income classified by taxpayers? The technical answers to problems of this type usually take the form that even when such transformations are held to be feasible by some scientific community, the computations involved may be massive or elaborate or sometimes both at once and, consequently, costly or timeconsuming. We have illustrated by means of a fable, the fundamental problem typically confronting the serious user of Federal statistics-in industry, in the academic world, or in Federal, state, and local governments: the conversion of resources of time, money, knowledge, and influence into a rational fitting together of available statistical data from diverse sources to meet the constraints of the problem, case, or presentation. Where such efforts in reorganization or transformation of available statistical data must fail on technical grounds, the serious user can undertake to sponsor and/or support the required organization of data by means of a new statistical reporting system. This may be the most reasonable solution of the potential user's immediate problem; especially so, if the totality of all such new reporting systems can be so designed as to advance the feasibility of practicable reorganizations of statistical data in the future.