The release of this year's Australian Bureau of Statistic's report on the use of Information Technology in Australian households has been delayed.
The results of the survey -- which examined Internet access methods, availability and numbers of fixed lines in homes - were due for release today according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics publication schedule.
Late last week the bureau's Science and Technology unit revealed that that the earliest release for the statistics was now expected to be late September.
The ABS has already given itself a three-month extension to report the statistics this year. Over the previous two years the statistics were released in June and May respectively.
"In theory it should be available late next week but now it'll be late September or early October...which is a bit of a shame, it's getting to be quite old data by then," said Jon Ovington Assistant Director of the Australian Bureau of Statistic (ABS) Science and Technology unit.
Despite acknowledging that the statistics will be late when they're released next week, Ovington said it would wrong to characterise the circumstances around their late appearance as delay. He said the survey is undergoing standard ABS approval processes.
The initial three-month delay came about due to the ABS's decision to find more robust ways to collect data on households.
Following a review of its Household Survey Program in 2000, the ABS has opted to discontinue use of the Population Service Monitor (PSM), the mainstay of its household monitoring apparatus.
Like many other survey projects run within the ABS, the Science and Technology unit relied on the ABS quarterly household Population Survey Monitor to collect household IT usage data.
Seeking a new way to cover the 2001 period, the Science and Technology unit chose to let the IT survey piggy-back the ABS survey of education and training which runs every four years.
While the PSM dealt with sample groups of around 3,000 households, quarterly, the education and training survey (renamed Education, Training and Information Technology) deals with 17,000 households. Ovington said the extra workload accounts for the three-month extension to the reporting period.
According to Ovington, the survey has now been completed and is waiting release by ABS senior managers.
