Persons with refugee background

Name: Persons with refugee background
Topic: Population

Division for Population Statistics

The nation and the counties.

The base data are on person level and can technically be distributed on all regional levels. Confidential considerations determine the regional level to be used in each case.

Annually

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Statistics Norway can grant access to the source data (de-identified or anonymised microdata) on which the statistics are based, for researchers and public authorities for the purposes of preparing statistical results and analyses. Access can be granted upon application and subject to conditions. Refer to the details about this at Access to data from Statistics Norway.

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The National programme for official statistics sets the framework for the areas Statistics Norway and other public authorities produce statistics on. The programme defines and outlines official statistics.

Further information about the system for quality in official statistics can be found at ssb.no

The statistics are compiled to distinguish persons with a refugee background from other immigrants, and were published for the first time in 1999 as Dagens statistikk (Daily Statistics), Refugees 1 January 1998. Since then it has been published regularly.

It is not meant to replace the Norwegian Directorate of Immigration's statistics on decisions and legal grounds. The figures are not necessarily in agreement with the Norwegian Directorate of Immigration's statistics on decisions and legal grounds.

Research institutes, public administration, the media and private persons.

No external users have access to statistics before they are released at 8 a.m. on ssb.no after at least three months’ advance notice in the release calendar. This is one of the most important principles in Statistics Norway for ensuring the equal treatment of users.

Statistics on persons with refugee background show population numbers. The area is clearly connected with other migration statistics. Immigrants and Norwegian-born to immigrant parents and Immigrants by reason for immigration

Immigration and emigration numbers can be found in the migration statistics for each calendar year.

The statistics are developed, produced and disseminated pursuant to Act no. 32 of 21 June 2019 relating to official statistics and Statistics Norway (the Statistics Act).

The statistics are included in the national programme for official statistics, under the main domain Population and the sub-domain Immigrants.

Statistical time series are available from 1998 onwards and from 2010 onwards.

Discontinued time series from 1998 to 2009.

Covers all persons who at one time arrived in Norway as refugees (including families) and neither have parents nor grandparents born in Norway, registered as a resident of Norway on 1 January (for who is counted for as a resident of Norway, see section 4.1 in "About the statistics) The persons does not necessarily have refugee status under the Geneva Convention. Children born to refugees after their arrival in Norway are not counted

Who is regarded as a resident of Norway and where in Norway a person will be counted as a resident, is stipulated in the Population Registration Act of 16 January 1970. The regulations to the act were last amended effective 1 October 1998.

Asylum seekers and persons on short-term stays (less than six months) are not registered as residents in the population register and thus not included in the statistics.

The data is the result of a linkage between different data sources. The most important data sources are the Central Population Register (CPR) in the Directorate of Taxes, and the Aliens Register (Utlendingsdatabasen –UDB) in the Norwegian Directorate of Immigration.

The CPR is the most important data source in Statistics Norway's population statistics system. In addition, data from the 1960 and 1970 population censuses are included as a supplement. The same applies to older statistical files which originate from population register data. The definition of first-time immigrations is based on CPR data alone.

In 2004, UDB replaced the Fremkon register (the old Aliens register) and the Refugee Register. Central information from these two registers were adapted to new standards and included in UDB. As a result, UDB now contains data going back to 1991, several years before UDB was introduced in the handling of cases.

The single most important variable in UDB for the statistics is reason for decision. If the information on that variable is missing, other similar variables are used.

An important supplementary source is the 2004 edition of the file for reason for immigration produced in 1995 and updated by use of data from the Refugee Register. It covers the persons that do not have satisfying information in UDB.

The population register data have been processed. The new focus in the processing leading to reason for immigration is the task to achieve the best linkage possible between the ID number in UDB and Personal Identification Number, and subsequently to find the first reason for immigration for as many foreign-born as possible.

The process of obtaining a linkage between the two ID number series is based on links that are found both in UDB and CPR. These links are controlled, linked and compared, and improved considerably. The result is a common definition of the persons in the two input data sets.

When this task is accomplished, the next step is to find the information in UDB that, as best as possible, states the reason for the first immigration event registered in the CPR.

One challenge in this connection is that most persons are registered with several cases (even if most of them are just renewals), and that the information may differ from case to case. In many cases the most specific information is found on some of the later cases registered on a person. For some persons this comprehensive information is copied to the former cases.

Another challenge is to identify the case which most probably is related to the first immigration registered in the CPR. There are no variables in UDB that make it possible to pick out the most relevant case in all cases.

The main principle is that the reason for immigration is taken from the last registration before the immigration was registered in the CPR, but there are exceptions if the actual case does not provide sufficient and reliable information. In these cases other registrations or sources are used as indication of the reason for immigration.

One of these supplementary sources is the file of reason for immigration produced in 2006. That year the task was resolved by finding the most relevant case for each of the main reasons, and then make a choice between these reasons (for persons with more than one main reason). The choice was based on the main reason which is seen as the most reliable in each case. In reality, refugee as reason for immigration was chosen before the others.

In case of missing source of reason for immigration imputations are made, based on variables like citizenship and age at the immigration. In general, there is a greater need for imputations in the older data (from the beginning of the 1990s and earlier) than in data registered in the new UDB system (started in 2004).

In this process, some children without their own reason for immigration get a value from their parents.

The problems with varying reliability may have the effect that some persons are allocated e.g. Refugee as the reason for immigration in stead of Family, as would have been the result if the registrations had been more complete.

The next challenge is to identify the most probable reference in Norway (the "resident person") in family immigration cases. If this reference is not stated in the UDB data, CPR information on relationships is used to find the spouse, children, parents or siblings that possibly may have been the reference at the first immigration. In this process spouse takes precedence over the other categories. The method identifies persons that may have been the reference for foreign-born. However, the method does not guarantee that the identified person actually and legally was the reference.

The construction of a variable called "type of family unification" (distinguishing between reunification, accompanying person and formation/extension) also causes several challenges, both concerning missing data and conceptual difficulties. The classification is mainly based on assessments of dates of immigration and marriage (when relevant) of both the immigrant and the reference person, and on registrations of that variable in the UDB data. The determination of limit values used in the classification is based on assessments.

Not relevant.

Data from the Population Register is transfered to SSB every day. SSB receives a file with data from UDB once a year.

In addition to the checks made by the DSF, Statistics Norway performs checks for statistical purposes. For more details of our control routines in the various subject areas, see: Dokumentasjon av BESYS-befolkningsstatistikksystemet. Befolkningsendringer i 1998 og befolkningsbasen (BEBAS) 1. januar 2000. Anne Sofie Brørs, Kirsten Dybendal, Aslaug Hurlen Foss og Trude Jakobsen, Notat 2000/24 Statistisk sentralbyrå. (In Norwegian only)

Editing is defined here as checking, examining and amending data.

Interviewers and everyone who works at Statistics Norway have a duty of confidentiality. Statistics Norway has its own data protection officer.

Statistics Norway does not publish figures where there is a risk of identifying individual data about persons or households [enter the correct unit here, where applicable].

The ‘[suppression, rounding up/down, perturbation]¹’ method is used in these statistics to ensure this.

More information can be found on Statistics Norway’s website under Methods in official statistics, in the ‘Confidentiality’ section.

Time: The figures are comparable from 1998, the first year the statistics were published.

Place: Because the population is small, the figures are little suited to analysis at the smallest geographical level. In many municipalities, particularly the small ones, the figures from year to year can vary considerably, often because of the location of the reception centres for asylum seekers.

Figures at the municipal level have to be specially ordered and meet privacy protection requirements.

Some errors in connection with collecting and processing data are unavoidable and may include coding, revision and data processing errors. The processing includes imputations and decisions which may be debatable. New information in the future may lead to the correction of errors made on an earlier occasion.

Errors and uncertainties are more common in the oldest data (especially in 1990).

The quality of the basic data from the Central Population Register is generally very good for statistical purposes. Two drawbacks are nevertheless late or missing notifications and registration of residence.

Some persons neglect to register emigration and it results in missing notifications. Late notifications cause events to be recorded and counted during the wrong calendar year. This is less problematic when the numbers are added up for several years.

A revision is a planned change to figures that have already been published, for example when releasing final figures as a follow-up to published preliminary figures. See also Statistics Norway’s principles for revisions.