ABSTRACT
A census is most easily seen by researchers as being a set of data about the population of a country, but is more broadly understood as being a workflow process of legal and practical planning, of data collection, and of data editing and processing which finally results in a set of outputs being produced, be they printed volumes, analytical reports or sets of machine-readable data. This chapter provides some historical context for the 2011 Census and, in particular, considers how the questions which have been asked in censuses since 1801 have evolved.
