Usual residence

Hello & welcome to our discussion of “Usual residence”.
I’m Bronwen, from Statistics New Zealand. I look forward to open and inclusive discussion over the next six weeks to understand your “Usual residence” needs. Looking forward to hearing from you

A significant number of people do not know their official address well enough to locate them. When enumerators called, at least they got the right meshblock. But with online entry that check might be missing. Perhaps an online validation is required to be confirmed on a map. If an address does not pass, it would then need manual intervention. How precise does the address have to be? Maybe the flat number can be ignored, but that would mean that the population counts may not match the dwelling counts.

Will there be any attempt to reconcile alias addresses? These are in-use addresses that are not the same as the 'official' address. Unfortunately NPAD is only alias addresses, they simply record whatever a customer puts on their letterbox.

Perhaps redesign the fields for address to encourage more complete addresses and avoid postal addresses? eg PO Box and RD numbers? Separate out flat numbers explicitly so they are not confused with street numbers, there is no place for street number alpha, street type could be on a separate line, the flat number should be placed before the street number on the form. The flat number might be a unit letter or floor. There is no space for that. The address should say 'situation address', not 'postal address'.
There could be an optional postcode, this would help resolve ambiguous road name mis-spellings.
If the address is not complete, then a space for a building or farm name would be useful because we can use a lookup to locate these.

The guidelines allow overseas residents to add in a non-new zealand address, but there is no field for 'country'
There is no advice on how to fill in an address in the guide.

All valid comments thanks @kimollivier - Bronwen

I undertake research on health of older people, including on population use of residential aged care. I have commented elsewhere on reporting on use of retirement villages that I suggest needs to be routinely tracked in censuses.
But of even greater importance is good information on people living in residential aged care (e.g. rest home or geriatric hospital). While the census now captures (we think) most people living in care, we do not know how often people living in care are away from the facility, eg visiting family or in acute hospital on census night. Nor how many use residential care for short-term stays (to give family caregivers a break or for rehabilitation).
Might it be possible to glean a little more information for people who are not in their usual place of residence on census night, and produce tables of adjusted counts of people who are usually resident in care?
My only concern is that some people may say they still live in when they have moved into care and it is not expected that they will move out again. I don't know how StatsNZ would get round that.

Thanks for your comments @joannabroad. I will pass this round for the team to look at and will get back to you with a response - Bronwen

Just a thought from an ordinary citizen whose only interest in the census is filling it out. Many people have no fixed residence or identifiable residence: people who live nomadic lifestyles in mobile homes or who live in various styles of habitations in remote rural locations (off road) or in caravans in holiday parks, etc. I think these sections of the population are of no interest to the people who rely on statistics information for their organisations, but still I think it is a requirement that we fill in the census?

Hi Alexandra, perhaps the information about people of no fixed abode such as you describe would be of interest to many: NGO's who work in this field, Government departments, charities, and many others who would find value in identifying the numbers in this situation.
While many individuals might choose to live this way, many in Auckland and elsewhere are forced to do so because of the crisis in housing affordability and availability. This is an emerging trend that didn't exist in NZ in the past [except perhaps the Great Depression years].