Share your input on the Survey of Household Spending (SHS)

Consultative engagement objectives

The Survey of Household Spending (SHS) is a national survey that gathers information on the spending habits of Canadians and allows Statistics Canada to measure changes in these spending patterns. It looks at how much households pay for, among others, food, clothing, shelter and transportation.

To continue to provide good quality data in a timely manner and to address challenges such as the response burden and costs associated with the survey, Statistics Canadas seeks to better understand how SHS users and stakeholders use the data. The main goal of the consultation is to gather information from external SHS users about the data they use, the frequency, the purpose (their outcome) and the specific products they use (how they access SHS data).

How to get involved

This consultative engagement initiative is now closed.

Statistics Canada is committed to respecting the privacy of consultation participants. All personal information created, held, or collected by the agency is kept strictly confidential; it is protected by the Privacy Act. For more information on Statistics Canada's privacy policies, please consult the privacy notice.

Results

A summary of the findings from the consultative engagement initiative:

• The Survey of Household Spending (SHS) serves a diverse range of users, including federal, provincial, municipal, and territorial governments, businesses, statistical focal point offices, and academic institutions.
• Users view the SHS as a crucial and unique source of detailed data on household expenditures, especially in the context of economic policy-making.
  • Users indicated they use SHS data for detailed analysis, market research, to develop models and predictions of household spending, and to conduct affordability studies, among other things.
• Survey users are often interested in data from each survey cycle for both the provinces and the territorial capitals.
• SHS data is primarily accessed through online data tables on the Statistics Canada website, Public Use Microdata Files (PUMF) and data in the Research Data Centres (RDC).
• The main analytical products accessed are articles and reports on the Statistics Canada website and The Daily articles. SHS's analytical products were found to be useful for research and conducting analysis, and understanding the survey methodology, the data, and its applications.
• Some suggested improvements to better meet user's needs:
  • More detailed spending categories.
  • More disaggregated data tables available online (e.g. Census metropolitan area (CMA) and census agglomeration (CA) by tenure).
  • Alignment of SHS classification with other sources (e.g. macroeconomic accounts).
  • Adding supplementary household information (e.g. disability flag)
  • Making the survey data easier to link with other sources and information (e.g. Market Basket Measure (MBM) poverty threshold).
  • Improve capture of full household spending, including credit use and interest, affecting low-income households.
  • Improve release timeliness – the time between collection and data release.

Thank you to all participants for contributing to this consultation and sharing your valuable feedback. The SHS continually strives to make data products as relevant and useful to users as possible, while also managing the burden on our valued respondents in order to maintain participation and data quality.