Press release No. 28 of August 5, 2022

• Personal interviews will normally end in mid August, reminders will be sent until the end of November

WIESBADEN - The personal interviews of the 2022 Census will end soon. “We are on schedule”, Dr. Georg Thiel, President of the Federal Statistical Office is pleased to say. “There is a very high level of acceptance among the population. Many people have made use especially of the opportunity to participate online. Our systems process hundreds of thousands of data sets every day.” The short personal interviews are performed to determine who lives at the addresses and in the households selected at random. The municipal survey offices make good progress regarding these interviews.

Regular personal interviews will end in mid August
The personal interviews conducted by interviewers will generally be finished in mid August, that is, 12 weeks after the census reference date.
Roughly three quarters of the respondents answer additional questions, preferably by online questionnaire, after the personal interview. People who could not be met yet will be interviewed even after the period of 12 weeks. Also, individual cases will still be settled after the 12-week period. The online and paper-based surveys collecting additional data continue.
For a small number of the households already surveyed, an additional follow-up survey is conducted in parallel to the main survey and will be finished by mid November 2022. This survey is held to subsequently assess the quality of the data obtained.

83% have responded to the census of buildings and housing
The overall response rate in the census of buildings and housing has reached already just under 83% after slightly more than two months. The owners of residential space contacted all over Germany have already completed just under 20 million questionnaires so far. “We are particularly pleased that a large majority have completed the questionnaires online”, says Dr. Georg Thiel. “This shows that there is a high level of acceptance of the online response in this survey, too.” By the way, most online questionnaires have been completed on Sundays so far. Over 720,000 online questionnaires of the census of buildings and housing were answered on 29 May 2022. Data collection for the census of buildings and housing will be finished in November 2022.

More information on the 2022 Census and pictures for reproduction are provided www.zensus2022.de. In addition, the Federal Statistical Office and the statistical offices of the Länder are available for questions at www.zensus2022.de/contact and www.twitter.com/zensus2022. If you are interested, we will be pleased to find you interview partners to discuss census issues.

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For further information: www.zensus2022.de/contact