Survey on Social Connections - Well-being in Canada (SSC-WC)

Detailed information for 2025

The Survey on Social Connections - Well-being in Canada (SSC-WC) is a new survey in 2025 which aims to provide a picture of the social connections and experiences of people living in Canada.

Data release - October 24, 2025

• Questionnaire(s) and reporting guide(s)
• Description
• Data sources and methodology
• Data accuracy

Description

The Survey on Social Connections - Well-being in Canada (SSC-WC) is a new survey in 2025. This project is collected as part of the Disaggregated Data Action Plan (DDAP) with the objective of producing detailed statistical information highlighting the lived experiences of specific population groups, as well as increased analytical insights on diverse groups of people. Questionnaire content will cover a variety of social topics. The frame of the survey is constructed using the 2021 Census Edit & Imputation database combined with a sample of recent immigrants from the Longitudinal Immigration Database (IMDB) file and recent files received from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC). The SSC-WC was designed to provide estimates within racialized groups and immigration status categories.

Please visit the link below for more information on the IMDB.
https://www23.statcan.gc.ca/imdb/p2SV.pl?Function=getSurvey&SDDS=5057

Reference period: 2025

Collection period: April to June

Subjects

• Society and community

Data sources and methodology

Target population

The target population for the SSC-WC are those aged 15 years and older living in the ten provinces of Canada, with a focus on ensuring coverage of racialized groups and immigration status through oversampling. Specifically excluded from the survey's coverage are:

- residents of Yukon, the Northwest Territories, Nunavut;
- full-time residents of institutions and certain other collectives;
- residents of First Nations reserves and settlements.

Instrument design

Statistics Canada's Questionnaire Design Resource Centre (QDRC) provided input and feedback of the survey questionnaires. Question wording adheres as closely as possible to questions established by the Harmonized Content Committee at Statistics Canada.

The questionnaires follow standard practices and wording used in a computer-assisted interviewing environment, such as the automatic control of flows that depend upon answers to earlier questions and the use of edits to check for logical inconsistencies and capture errors. The computer applications for data collection were tested extensively.

Sampling

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

Sampling unit:
The sampling unit of this survey is a person.

Stratification method:
To ensure that we can produce reliable estimates disaggregated for domains of interest, we stratify by variables such as geographic region, racialized groups and immigrant status. For the immigration portion of the frame, we stratify by country of origin.

In order to allow for comparisons and to cover the entire target population, we also sampled individuals who did not self-identify as belonging to a racialized group.

Sampling and sub-sampling:
Within each stratum, a simple random sample was selected.

Data sources

Data collection for this reference period: 2025-04-11 to 2025-06-22

Responding to this survey is voluntary.

Data are collected directly from survey respondents either through an electronic questionnaire (EQ) or through computer assisted telephone interviewing (CATI). First contact is made by an invitation letter in the mail, which provides a link and access code for completing the survey electronically. A non-responding individual may receive reminders by mail, by email or by SMS before they are contacted by a Statistics Canada interviewer to complete the questionnaire over the telephone.

Proxy responses are not allowed.

Statistics Canada used the information provided by respondents from the 2021 Census, data extracted from the Longitudinal Immigration Database (IMDB) and recent files received from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) to create the survey frame.

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

Error detection

Electronic files containing the daily transmissions of completed respondent survey records were combined to create the "raw" survey file. Before further processing, verification was performed to identify and drop duplicate and non-response records. Records that did not meet minimum response criteria were identified and removed.

Imputation

Imputation is a process used to determine and assign replacement values to resolve problems of missing, invalid, or inconsistent data. This is done by changing some of the missing values and the responses on the record being edited to ensure that a plausible, internally consistent record is created. Imputation was performed on the socio-demographic variables included in the SSC-WC.

Estimation

The estimation of population characteristics from a sample survey is based on the premise that each person in the sample represents a certain number of other persons in addition to themselves. This number is referred to as the survey weight. The weighting of the sample for the SSC-WC has multiple stages to reflect the stages of sampling and response to obtain the final set of respondents. The steps for weighting, including non-response adjustment and calibration, are described in chapter 7 of the SSC-WC User Guide. These steps adjust the weights so that they align with the target population, with regards to certain characteristics, such as age-gender groups by region. To the extent that these characteristics are correlated with the variables of interest, these adjustments can improve the accuracy of the survey estimates. Variance estimation is based on a two-phase bootstrap. Please refer to section 7.6 of the User Guide for how to use the variance multiplicative factor when calculating estimates of sampling error, such as variance, standard error or CV.

Quality evaluation

While quality assurance mechanisms are applied at all stages of the statistical process, the validation and review of data by statisticians is the final verification of quality prior to release. Validation measures that were implemented include:
a) verification of estimates through cross-tabulations
b) consultation with stakeholders internal to Statistics Canada

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.

For microdata: content is reduced and modified. For tabular data: sensitive cells correction methods such as cell collapsing and suppression are applied.

Revisions and seasonal adjustment

This methodology type does not apply to this statistical program.

Data accuracy

Survey errors come from a variety of different sources. One dimension of survey error is sampling error. Sampling error is defined as the error that arises because an estimate is based on a sample rather than the entire population. Sampling error can be expressed through a confidence interval or coefficient of variation.

Response rates
Survey on Social Connections - Well-being in Canada (SSC-WC) response rate: 30.8%

Non-sampling error
Non-sampling errors can be defined as errors arising during the course of virtually all survey activities, apart from sampling. They are present in both sample surveys and censuses (unlike sampling error, which is only present in sample surveys). Non-sampling errors arise primarily from the following sources: non-response, coverage, measurement, and processing.

Measurement errors (or sometimes referred to as response errors) occur when the response provided differs from the real value; such errors may be attributable to the respondent, the questionnaire, the collection method, or the respondent's record-keeping system. Such errors may be random, or they may result in a systematic bias if they are not random.

Processing errors are the errors associated with activities conducted once survey responses have been received. They include all data handling activities after collection and prior to estimation. Like all other errors, they can be random in nature, and inflate the variance of the survey's estimates, or systematic, and introduce bias. It is difficult to obtain direct measures of processing errors and their impact on data quality especially since they are mixed in with other types of errors (nonresponse, measurement, and coverage).

Non-response bias
Survey weights were adjusted to minimize potential bias that could arise from survey non-response. Non-response adjustments were applied to survey weights using available auxiliary information from the long-form Census and the immigration files. To mitigate potential non-response bias, the survey weights are adjusted for total non-response taking into account socio-demographic variables such as racialized group, education level, household composition and immigration status, and are calibrated to population totals for age, gender and geography.

Coverage error
Coverage errors consist of omissions, erroneous inclusions, duplications, and misclassifications of units in the survey frame. Coverage errors may cause a bias in the estimates and the effect can vary for different sub-groups of the population.

The SSC-WC data is collected from people aged 15 years and over living in private dwellings within the 10 provinces. Excluded from the survey's coverage are residents of Yukon, the Northwest Territories, and Nunavut; full-time residents of institutions and certain other collectives, and residents of First Nations reserves and settlements. These groups together represent an exclusion of less than 2% of the Canadian population aged 15 and over.