Survey of Staffing (SOS)

Survey of Staffing (SOS)
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Detailed information for October 1, 2007 to September 30, 2008 (Cycle 1)

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 - May 14, 2009

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.

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: 2009-01-07 to 2009-02-20

Responding to this survey is voluntary.

Data are collected directly from survey respondents.

In December 2008, as part of the communication plan, two official letters announcing the initiative were sent to the participating departments; one communiqué to the Deputy Ministers and another communiqué to the Heads of Human Resources.

From January 7th to 9th, 2009, each person in the sample was contacted by e-mail and invited to complete an electronic questionnaire available on the Statistics Canada website. Those who could not be contacted by e-mail or who did not have access to the Statistics Canada website (or required an internet browser) were invited to complete a paper questionnaire.

During collection five reminder e-mails were sent to participants in the electronic collection who had not already submitted their electronic questionnaire. Only one reminder was sent to participants in the paper collection. Individuals who refused to participate did not receive the reminder notifications.

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

Not applicable.

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.

In order to produce the final weights, a first adjustment was made to the initial weight to account for the SOS nonresponse. A second and final adjustment was made to produce 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

We applied quality control and assurance methods in accordance with current Statistics Canada practices, at each stage of the collecting and processing cycle, in order to verify the quality of the data. We edited particularly to detect missing, invalid or incoherent data.

Disclosure control

Statistics Canada is prohibited by law from releasing any information it collects which 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.

No public use microdata file will be produced by Statistics Canada and data will not be made available through the Data Liberation Initiative (DLI).

Revisions and seasonal adjustment

This methodology does not apply to this survey.

Data accuracy

Response rates and sampling error:

The response rate for this survey was 44.5%. Departmental response rates ranged from 29.5% to 68.0%.

The results estimated from 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. CV tables are prepared by Statistics Canada and made available to help users understand the quality of individual estimates.

Documentation

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