The Department of Statistics reports a “healthy response rate of 86 percent thus far” for the fifth Household Expenditure Survey (HES) that concluded at the end of August.The survey began in May with roughly 70 interviewers assigned to ten households each. Ultimately 64 interviewers assigned to the task.According to Director of Statistics, Valerie Robinson-James: “There are 20 interviewers still in the field collecting outstanding survey documents from households they may have missed or those who perhaps were on vacation and have returned back. As such, the response rate will increase somewhat.”Although the survey period was from May to August 2013, she said the first two weeks in September had been set aside for the wrap up of the HES.“Interviewers have been advised to collect all administrative documents from households by September 16 and return their survey interview kits to the Department by Friday, September 20th for sign off.”Moving forward she said: “The department now has to manually review all the weekly survey diaries that households completed — just over 1,000 to-date.“This process is called editing and coding which at this point is 41 percent completed.“These diaries document stated expenditures on goods and services purchased by households on a daily basis for two continuous weeks.“Once this is completed the data must be keyed and processed. We anticipate the entire data processing phase of the survey data to be completed by mid-October 2013. This will be followed by two weeks of data verification.“The credibility checks are critical at this point to ensure that the data collected are of high quality.“Statisticians will then run the data to produce tabulations to compare with data tabulations produced during the last HES conducted in 2004,” she added.“A comparative analysis will then be written in report form to assess what changes occurred in expenditure patterns for Bermuda households. The report should be ready for dissemination to the general public by early December.”The primary aim of the 2013 HES “is to obtain household income and expenditure data and information for a broad range of consumer goods and services purchased by households”.These include: food, beverages, clothing, furniture, motor vehicles, travel, medical, household and personal services.The data and information will be used to “revise the basket of goods and services for the Consumer Price Index (CPI) which measures the annual rate of inflation, develop new benchmark values for household consumption for use in estimating the annual growth of the economy or Gross Domestic Product (GD); and, to assess the level of economic well-being for households in Bermuda”.