The New View on Editing

Numerous evaluation and other studies show that the heavy cost of editing cannot be justified by quality improvement. It is necessary to replace the old paradigm-the more and tighter the checks and recontacts, the better the quality-by a new-focus the editing on identifying and collecting data on errors, problem areas, and error causes to provide a basis for a continuous improvement of the whole survey vehicle.
The corner stone of the new view on editing is that the entire set of the query edits should be designed meticulously, be focused on errors influencing the estimates, and be targeted on existing error types which can be identified by edits, and finally that the effects of the edits should be continuously evaluated by analysis of performance measures and other diagnostics, which the process should be designed to produce.
The paper is a short introduction to modern editing under the new view. It presents, also, some facts to the low efficiency of traditional editing, and explains it by giving a historical review of editing.