The Communitarian Censuses and technological choices: the use of Personal Digital Assistants

Abstract

This article presents the experience of applying communitarian censuses, contextualized within the Law of the Communal Councils of 2006, as an answer to the absence of sociodemographic information on popular urban settlements in Venezuela. These are censuses aiming to respond necessary questions such as how many people live there, how they are distributed by ages and by sex, in how many houses, and also, considering that the information collected is fundamental, as much for the institutions as for community-based organizations, at the time of assigning financial resources. But, regarding this information collected among the community and -in this case- with the support of the School of Sociology of the Central University of Venezuela, the question appears on the quality, the trustworthiness and the opportunity of the collected data, and the information generated from that data. This article goes through the methodological steps followed in Nuevo Horizonte, a small urban settlement in the Capital District, for the accomplishment of twenty censuses, from the collection of the data to its processing and diffusion. The procedures followed for the revision, imputation and correction of the data are exposed. Finally, it is reflected, in a hypothetical way, the possibilities of applying Personal Digital Assistant (PDA), with a view to obtaining the optimization of the production of sociodemographic data.