Proposal Description

With declining budgets, increasing demands and a proliferation of alternative players in the arena of statistics, producers of official statistics are under ever more pressure to stake their claim on public funds, by proving and even quantifying the value of their products.

But recent work under the Conference of European Statisticians suggests that in order to prove that something has value, organizations need to properly understand what value means. Value means different things to different people, necessitating decisions about which needs, and whose needs, we are trying to fulfil, how, and why. Any indicators we use to quantify value must be clearly grounded in the concepts they’re supposed to measure.

This shift in perspective calls for an entirely new approach to understanding the value of official statistics—one that calls for critical self-assessment and wide-ranging consultation, instead of starting out from an assumption that the value of official statistics is a given.

This session will explore the topic from both a conceptual angle and a practical one. It will offer an examination of how the value of official statistics can be understood, as well as showcasing national and international examples of attempts to understand value in practice, the challenges faced in doing so, and how the resulting information can be harnessed.

The session will ask:
• How are statistical organizations defining and assessing fulfilment of their goal to add value to society?
• How do statistical organizations discern the value they are providing to society? How is impact identified and quantified?
• Do our usual metrics of engagement and usage really tell us what we think they do?
• What can, or should, we do with an improved understanding of our value?