Abstract: At present, departments of government statistics in many countries generally pay attention to coverage error estimation, but neglect or even eliminate content error estimation. In order to improve this situation, this paper is the first to systematically study the four evaluation indexes through sampling estimation and field verification, namely, consistency rate, net difference rate, inconsistency index, and total inconsistency index, which are used to estimate census content errors. First, the census population registration list, the quality assessment survey population registration list, the matched population registration list from the same small census area, and the sampling weights of the sample small census areas are used to construct the estimator of each evaluation index and its sampling variance estimator based on the Jack-knife method. Secondly, the calculation processes of evaluation indicators are demonstrated through a real case. Finally, the conclusion of the study is given: each evaluation index does not cover all content errors; improving the quality of matching work is the key to ensure the accuracy of content error assessment; we should pay attention to the comparability of horizontal and vertical comparison of content errors. This paper can optimize the census quality evaluation scheme of government statistics department, and improve the accuracy of census content error estimation.

Key words: population census, census quality evaluation, census error, census content error