Statistics Canada
www.statcan.gc.ca
Common menu bar links
1991 Census microdata files
- Overview
- Downloading the microdata
- Using the microdata
- How these files were created
- For further information
These files were developed for teachers and students working with microdata for data analysis. Microdata files are unique in that they give users access to unaggregated data. This makes the public use microdata files powerful research tools. Each file contains a representative sample of anonymous individual responses on 40 variables.
The 1991 Census microdata are provided as tab-delimited ASCII files for:
- Canada (1000 records)
- Newfoundland (994 records)
- Prince Edward Island (956 records)
- Nova Scotia (989 records)
- New Brunswick (934 records)
- Quebec (997 records)
- Ontario (997 records)
- Manitoba (982 records)
- Saskatchewan (976 records)
- Alberta (994 records)
- British Columbia (994 records)
- Yukon and Northwest Territories (849 records)
The user can group and manipulate the variables to suit his/her own data and research requirements. Tabulations can be created or relationships between variables can be analysed. These files provide quick access to a comprehensive social and economic database about Canada and its people. To ensure the anonymity of the respondents, geographic identifiers have been restricted to the provinces/territories and large metropolitan areas. Extensive demographic, social, cultural and economic information such as age, schooling, ethno-cultural and income characteristics are provided.
A detailed list of the attributes is provided, along with comments on the coding and interpretation of each attribute.
These Canada and province microdata files were extracted from the 1991 Census individual file containing over 800,000 records. To estimate totals for each province or Canada, a weighting factor should be applied to these smaller files. The factor is 33.333 (for the original 3% sample) times the R skip value (the number of records in the original 3% sample divided by 1,000). The resulting weighting factors (which should be multiplied by the sample file estimates) are shown in the table below.
| File |
Weighting factor
|
| Canada |
33.333 x 809
|
| Newfoundland |
33.333 x 17
|
| Prince Edward Island |
33.333 x 4
|
| Nova Scotia |
33.333 x 27
|
| New Brunswick |
33.333 x 22
|
| Quebec |
33.333 x 205
|
| Ontario |
33.333 x 300
|
| Manitoba |
33.333 x 33
|
| Saskatchewan |
33.333 x 30
|
| Alberta |
33.333 x 76
|
| British Columbia |
33.333 x 98
|
| Yukon and Northwest Territories |
33.333 x 3
|
Information on the complete 1991 Public use microdata file was published in catalogue number 95M0007GPE, which you may find in a university library.
For questions on using the microdata, contact Joel Yan, Learning Resources Team, Statistics Canada, joel.yan@statcan.gc.ca.
