The Australian Census Longitudinal Dataset: using record linkage to create a longitudinal sample from a series of cross-sections

The Australian Bureau of Statistics is creating a longitudinal sample, called the Australian Census Longitudinal Dataset (ACLD), by linking person records across its five‐yearly Census of Population and Housing. This paper proposes a Multi‐Panel framework for selecting and weighting records in the ACLD. This framework can be applied more generally to selecting longitudinal samples from a series of cross‐sectional administrative files. The proposed framework avoids some significant limitations of the popular ‘Top‐Up’ sampling approach to maintaining the cross‐sectional and longitudinal representativeness of a sample over time.