Evaluation And Adjustment of Age Sex Data of The Population And Housing Census of Ghana 2000 And 2010

ABSTRACT

The simplest and most basic census item age, mostly present difficulties with regard to its accuracy in statistically underdeveloped countries where civil registration coverage is limited in terms of its accessibility. The study aimed at evaluating and adjusting age data of the population and housing census of Ghana. Several evaluation tools were used to examine the errors. These include visual inspection of the data and at the same time graphing the single age data which revealed heaping at certain digits especially 0 and 5. Comparison was also made using computed sex ratio for Ghana and some selected African countries. Though there was a decline in the sex ratio from 97.3 in the year 2000 to 95.2 in 2010, Ghana’s sex ratio fell within the standard for an African country. The trend of decline experienced in the sex ratio at the national level, however affected most of the administrative regions of Ghana especially Ashanti, Greater Accra and Western regions. This phenomenon was attributed to the plausibility of more female migration to these regions. Analysis based on age ratio showed that the ages of females in the 20 to 29 age groups had been exaggerated plausibly because of “assuming a typical marriage age”. Likewise, ages of both males and females 50 years and above were misreported either by overstatement or understatement resulting in erratic fluctuations (signifying errors) when the ratios are plotted on a line graph. A relationship between literacy and digit preference was also established where it became evident that non-literate heads of household misreported more than their literate counterparts. Detection of error in the data resulted in the need to adjust the age-sex data. The Strong Smoothing technique proved to be closer to the observed population data.