Quality in the Office for National Statistics

What is quality?

Quality has many meanings, ranging from luxury and merit to excellence, good value for money, convenience and even practicality. It is often defined simply as ‘fitness for purpose’. Quality is a multi-faceted concept; different dimensions of quality will be important to different users.

ONS and quality

We aim for our outputs to:

• reflect known user needs

• be economical for all concerned in the process

• be produced using fit-for-purpose processes

• be transparent concerning the methods used

• be known to be produced to agreed standards

• be quality assured both in content and presentation

• be serviceable in the long term

Dimensions of quality

We use European Statistical System indicators of quality to discuss and measure our processes and outputs. For processes these are efficiency, effectiveness, robustness, flexibility, transparency and integration. For outputs they are accuracy, timeliness and punctuality, coherence, comparability, accessibility and relevance.

See the ONS Guidelines for measuring statistical quality for more detail on the output indicators. Similar guidelines on statistical process quality will soon be available.