Survey of Staffing (SOS)

Detailed information for July 1, 2009 to June 30, 2010 (Cycle 3)

Status:

Active

Frequency:

Annual

Record number:

5147

The Survey of Staffing is an annual survey that provides employees the opportunity to give feedback on their experiences with staffing processes within the federal public service.

This survey is one of the principal tools that the Public Service Commission uses to oversee staffing activities within the federal public service and to help improve government-wide staffing policies.

Data release - December 20, 2010 (No public use microdata file was produced by Statistics Canada and data will not be made available through the Data Liberation Initiative (DLI).)

Description

The Survey of Staffing is one of the most important tools that the Public Service Commission (PSC) of Canada uses to monitor staffing activity within the federal public service. It focuses on the core staffing values of merit and non-partisanship, the guiding values of fairness, access, transparency and representativeness and the management principles of efficiency, flexibility and time to staff.

The information gathered helps the PSC identify areas where the staffing system can be improved, either at the public service-wide or organizational level, and is used to support reporting to Parliament.

The survey collects data on experiences of public servants who have participated in a staffing process as a candidate and/or as a manager, including staffing strategies, the area of selection, assessment tools used and the outcome. Because we do not know anything in advance about the process you are describing, many of the questions ask for details that help to classify the type of process and positions being staffed. The survey also collects information on political activities.

Subjects

  • Employment and remuneration
  • Government

Data sources and methodology

Target population

The SOS targets public service employees who worked in federal departments and agencies which fall under the Public Service Employment Act (PSEA) and had at least 350 employees on the last day of the reference period with the following exceptions:

- non-civilians;
- governor-in-council appointments;
- minister's exempt staff; and
- employees engaged under a student employment program.

Instrument design

In the spring of 2007, English and French focus groups that included employees from different departments, at various groups and levels were held by Statistics Canada's Questionnaire Design Resource Centre across the country. In November and December of 2007, a pilot version of this survey was conducted by Statistics Canada in some departments. The contents of the questionnaire and the methods of collection of the survey were designed and implemented using the information gathered in the focus groups and the pilot survey.

The electronic format of the questionnaire was designed to follow standard practices and wording, when applicable, in an Internet-based environment. This includes the automatic control of question wording and flows that depended upon answers to earlier questions and the use of on-line edits to check for logical inconsistencies and capture errors such as out-of-range values. The electronic application for data collection was subjected to extensive testing.

For Cycle 3, the content for Section A which identifies if a respondent participated in a staffing process during the specific period of interest was reworked. For cycle 3, only specific staffing processes (i.e. indeterminant, term, acting or casual positions) would be asked the candidate questions. Focus groups were conducted to validate the reworded questions for Section A in addition to the Political Activities questions, which resulted in a slightly different version of content for this cycle.

Sampling

This is a sample survey with a cross-sectional design.

The sampling frame was made up of all in-scope employees that were on the Public Works and Government Services Canada's Incumbent file. Since the contact information (e-mail) was not available on the Incumbent file, it had to be collected by Statistics Canada from the departments through Article 13 of the Statistics Act.

The sampling unit was the employee. In each department, a stratified simple random sample of employees was selected from the sampling frame.

Data sources

Data collection for this reference period: 2010-09-07 to 2010-10-04

Responding to this survey is voluntary.

Data are collected directly from survey respondents.

Each person in the sample was contacted by e-mail and invited to complete an electronic questionnaire available on the Statistics Canada website.

During collection reminder e-mails were sent on a regular basis to participants in the electronic collection who will not have submitted their electronic questionnaire.

View the Questionnaire(s) and reporting guide(s) .

Error detection

Some editing was done directly at the time the electronic questionnaire was completed. Where the information was outside the range (too large or small) of expected values, or inconsistent with the previous entries, the respondent was prompted, through message screens, to verify the information. However, the respondents had the option of bypassing the edits, and of skipping questions if they did not know the answer or refused to answer. Therefore, the data were subjected to further edit processes after they were submitted.

The first type of error treated involved a lack of information in questions that should have been answered. For this type of error, a non-response or "not-stated" code was assigned to the item.

The second type of error treated was errors in questionnaire flow, where questions that did not apply to the respondent (and should therefore not have been answered) were found to contain answers. In this case a computer edit automatically eliminated superfluous data by following the flow of the questionnaire implied by answers to previous, and in some cases, subsequent questions.

Imputation

This methodology does not apply.

Estimation

Estimates representing in-scope employees were produced by assigning weights to each sampled employee. The weight of a sampled employee indicated the number of employees in the population that the unit represented. The initial weight was defined as the inverse of the probability of selection.

The weighting for the SOS consists of several steps:
Step 1 - Initial design weight
Step 2A - Non-response adjustment for the Master File
Step 2B - Non-response / non-sharing adjustment for the Share File
Step 3 - Post-stratification adjustment and final weight

In order to produce the final weights, a first adjustment was made to the initial weight to account for the SOS non-response. The non-response adjustment (or the non-response / non-sharing adjustment in the case of the Share File) and the post-stratification adjustment are used to calculate the final weight. This final adjustment consisted of post-stratification to the known counts of employees in each department. The quality of the estimates was assessed using estimates of their coefficient of variation (CV).

Quality evaluation

Considerable time and effort were taken to reduce non-sampling errors in the survey. Quality assurance measures were implemented at each step of the questionnaire development, data collection and processing cycle to monitor the quality of the data. These measures include focus group testing to detect problems of questionnaire design or misunderstanding of instructions, the use of highly tested computerized questionnaire applications, procedures to ensure that data capture errors were minimized, and edit quality checks to verify the processing logic.

Disclosure control

Statistics Canada is prohibited by law from releasing any information it collects that could identify any person, business, or organization, unless consent has been given by the respondent or as permitted by the Statistics Act. Various confidentiality rules are applied to all data that are released or published to prevent the publication or disclosure of any information deemed confidential. If necessary, data are suppressed to prevent direct or residual disclosure of identifiable data.

In order to prevent any data disclosure, confidentiality analysis is done using the Statistics Canada Generalized Disclosure Control System (G-Confid). G-Confid is used for primary suppression (direct disclosure) as well as for secondary suppression (residual disclosure). Direct disclosure occurs when the value in a tabulation cell is composed of or dominated by few enterprises while residual disclosure occurs when confidential information can be derived indirectly by piecing together information from different sources or data series.

Revisions and seasonal adjustment

This methodology does not apply to this survey.

Data accuracy

Quality control and assurance methods were applied, at each stage of the collection and processing cycle in accordance with current Statistics Canada practices, to verify the quality of the data. Editing was performed to detect missing, invalid or incoherent data.

Response rates and sampling error:

The response rate for this survey was 48.4%. Departmental response rates ranged from 38.6% to 72.2%.

The results estimated from the SOS - Candidates are based on a sample of employees in the target population. The results obtained from asking the same questions to all employees in the target population would differ to some known extent. The extent of this sampling error is quantified by the CV with the following guidelines:

- 16.5% and below: acceptable estimate
- 16.6% to 33.3%: marginal estimate requiring cautionary note to users; and
- 33.3% and above: unacceptable estimate.

Estimates that do not meet an acceptable level of quality are either flagged for caution or suppressed.

Documentation

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