Previous Story
HIES survey to start in June
The CNMI Department of Commerce is looking for additional staff to help them with the data gathering for the upcoming 2016 Household Income and Expenditure Survey.
According to Commerce Secretary Mark Rabauliman and the Central Statistics Division, they will be needing enumerators and data clerks to help with the data gathering phase of HIES, which is considered as “one of the largest surveys” of the department.
Thirty-six enumerators and about eight data clerks are needed for the survey, which will start in June. They will be supervised by staff and officers from CSD.
Aside from household income and expenditure, HIES will also provide information on labor force, unemployment rate, and various other socioeconomic indicators. Data from the survey will also be used to revise the CNMI Consumer Price Index.
Data from this survey will be used for grants applications as well as policy-making.
According to CSD’s Justin Andrew, a sample size of 10 percent of all occupied housing units in Saipan has been determined for the survey. There are about 12,000 units that are occupied in Saipan, and they will therefore have 1,200 houses that will be part of the study.
For Rota and Tinian, they will need to double the sample size to 20 percent.
A pretesting of the questionnaire was made through 100 randomly selected housing units in Saipan and the results will be used to finalize the survey questionnaire and edit the programs.
The HIES is funded by the Office of Insular Affairs, which granted $307,672 for the survey to be conducted.
In the grant funding, Commerce was asked, “to obtain, compile, and disseminate data on household income and expenditures in the Northern Mariana Islands and to provide cost-effective economic indicators, data, and performance measures related to economic development and self-sufficiency needs.”
HIES was last completed in 2005 and has been long overdue as the Commonwealth has been through a lot of development since with its once-prominent garment industry folded and federalization of customs and immigration being implemented.
