As the name indicates, the purpose of the population census is to take a census of the population. At the same time as the population is calculated other information on population structure is collected, such as age, gender, marital status and place of residence.
In addition to this population structure information, population censuses gather information on occupations, sources of livelihood and on the structure of families and household-dwelling units. In addition, the population census often includes calculation of dwellings, buildings and real estate. This is made to find out in what kinds of dwellings people are living and what the standard of equipment of the dwelling is (i.e. whether there is electricity, the type of heating, the number of rooms, etc.).
Population censuses are statutory, they are made every ten years and the population of the whole country is calculated in them. Population censuses are carried out in accordance with the recommendations and instructions drawn up by the United Nations (UN). This is to ensure that the data on different countries are mutually comparable.
The information is collected with a questionnaire filled in by every adult person. At the moment the information is no longer collected with questionnaires in Denmark and Finland but all the information can be derived from various registers. The population census is discussed more thoroughly in Lesson 4, Sub-section 4.15: Population census by combining information from different registers.
The following example is a compilation of the key information the UN recommends for countries to collect in population censuses.
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