The main role of the Unit is to provide technical assistance to other units within the NSO, covering various quality and methodological aspects of the processes needed to produce official statistics.
The methodological functions are normally required in sampling, survey design and other areas such as questionnaire design, data collection and statistical inference. Quality issues are normally domain and process specific, to ensure that the statistical business process employed in various domains is harmonised in terms of data, metadata (information that is needed to use and interpret statistics, such as: definitions of populations, objects, variables, the methodology and quality) and paradata (information related to a statistical data collection or production process). Other important areas include the anonymisation of micro and tabular data as well as the compilation and verification of metadata and quality-related documents.
In addition to the above tasks, the Methodology and Research unit is also responsible for the setting-up and updating of a number of administrative registers which are used internally by a number of units. These are normally required for sampling, benchmarking and statistical matching purposes.