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 Brazil's 2010 Demographic Census will bring new questions to the population in order to monitor the changes that occurred in Brazilian society over the course of ten years, New inquiries include marriage between people of the same gender.
Other questions by census takers will include ownership of birth certificate, household computers with Internet access, international emigration and access to government income transfer programs.
Another new feature is the fact that this will be the first fully computerized census: approximately 230,000 census takers will work with handheld computers and GPS. They are going to visit approximately 58 million households in the country's 5,565 municipalities.
The new features of the census were announced at the headquarters of the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), in Rio de Janeiro. The president of the institute, Eduardo Pereira Nunes, said that the computerization is going to be useful not only for compiling the data, but also for spreading the information.
"The IBGE is going to make all of the information available to users, who will be able to analyze whatever data they wish, depending on the variable that they are interested in. Furthermore, with these data, the Brazilian ministries will be able to outline new actions in public policies."
Some citizens will have the option of answering the questionnaire on the Internet. For such, instructions and an access code will be provided by the IBGE census taker.
The basic questionnaire will contain 16 questions and will be applied to all Brazilian households. The sample questionnaire will have 81 questions and will be answered by part of the population. The forecasted budget is 1.4 billion Brazilian reais (US$ 742 million).
The Experimental Census that also begun today in the city of Rio Claro, in the state of São Paulo, is going to be the last test before the Census 2010. The city has little over 191,000 inhabitants, and all will be interviewed for the census by November, according to Nunes.
The Census 2010 is scheduled to start on August 1st, 2010. On September 21st, the census agents will start being hired, and in the first half of March 2010, census takers will be hired. The IBGE is going to disclose the results in December 2010.
After the Census is over, approximately 140,000 handheld computers that will be used during the survey are going to be transferred over to the Ministry of Education, which is going to distribute the equipment to teacher networks at municipal schools.
The Census is held every ten years. The first census took place in 1872, when Brazil had roughly 10 million inhabitants. Presently, the country has approximately 190 million inhabitants.
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