Image of the Czech Statistical Office in the View of the Czech Public is Positive

 

The Czech Statistical Office (CZSO) enjoys prevailing trust, it is definitely considered to be a professional and useful institution, and information published by it are considered by majority of the Czech population to be interesting, trustworthy, and politically impartial. A vast majority of people also has at least a general idea about what the CZSO does.

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  • Since 2006, the CZSO has been ordering every year a survey (opinion poll) called “Image of the Czech Statistical Office in View of the Czech Public” from the Public Opinion Research Centre (CVVM) at the Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences. Current results of the survey (opinion poll) from February 2010 showed in general that the image of the Czech Statistical Office in view of the Czech public is prevailingly positive.
  • The CZSO enjoys trust of 64% of citizens, 19% of them mistrust it. However, with regards to political impartiality of the CZSO, the public is not familiar with the status of the CZSO in the structure of the state administration, whether the government controls or does not control information published by the CZSO.
  • 22% of the respondents stated that they know very exactly what the remit of the CZSO is, 67% have a clue about it, and 11% do not know it at all. Citizens of the CR most often connect the CZSO with the Population and Housing Census and with a survey on the population size. A significant majority of citizens also connects the CSZO with processing of election results, monitoring of the economic development, and comparison with international development.
  • The Czech public comes across information of the CZSO usually in a passive way by means of the media. A quarter of the population is actively seeking information of the CZSO at least sometimes, which they are doing by far most often on the Internet.
  • More detailed analyses showed that perception and knowledge, the same as an active approach to the CZSO and information it publishes, differ more or less mainly depending on the educational attainment; especially people with higher education are more often in contact with outputs of the CZSO and they evaluate these outputs and the CZSO as such more positively.
  • Over the last four years, the image of the CZSO has been looking rather stable for the time being; recorded changes only in isolated cases and not very markedly exceeded the statistical significance limit.

Trust and mistrust towards the CZSO in the context of assessment of other institutions (%)

Source: Final report from an opinion poll of the Public Opinion Research Centre (CVVM) called Image of the Czech Statistical Office in the View of the Czech Public – 2010 (Czech only)