The present map is based on the file “Inhabitants Legally Registered at the Places of their Main Residence in Berlin”, as of December 31, 2015, of the Berlin-Brandenburg Office of Statistics. The statistical system of the Residents’ Registration Office evaluates the data on all legally registered residents. As state-specific statistics, they primarily serve to provide small-scale demographic data, and to certify foreign residents according to their citizenships. It supplements the Official Population Extrapolation, which was provided with an updated statistical base with the 2011 Census (valid as of May 9, 2011), and is used primarily for statistical purposes, for instance to calculate the size of the federal-state revenue equalization. However, due to the different systems they use, there are deviations between the statistics of the Residents’ Registration Office (as of December 31, 2015: 3.609.678) and those of the Official Population Extrapolation (as of June 30, 2015: 3.484.995).
The latter is continued biannually on the basis of census data and of new registrations/ de- registrations).
As an administrative register, the Residents’ Registration Office cannot fully meet the precision requirements necessary for statistical accuracy. Thus for example the correction to account for registration deadlines with regard to residents’ moves, births or deaths currently still involves inevitable imprecision.
As a result of the issuance of uniform tax ID numbers, a particularly large number of foreigners who were no longer present at their legally registered addresses have been officially removed from the registry. The current results are therefore only comparable to a limited degree to those of previous years.
For the present map, all of the currently existing 381,000 Berlin address data were assigned to the block and block segment areas of the land-use file of the Urban and Environmental Information System (ISU). That made it possible to aggregate resident data not only at the level of statistical blocks, but also at that of the so-called block segments of the ISU, and thus obtained a presentation which can be directly compared with the preceding 2015 Edition.
Several factors that influence the precision of the data stock presented:
- For reasons of statistical confidentiality, cases with only one or two examples may not be presented with their real values. Therefore, in the case of block and block segment evaluations, these confidential cases (values “1” or “2”) are changed in such a way that they occur either three times or not at all. For this reason, no absolute resident values of less than “3” occur.
- Combinations of characteristics with an occurrence of “1” or “2” of reassigned in such a way that ultimately, only combinations are present which occur either not at all or at least three times. The automatic confidentiality procedure used can not only prevent table values of less than “3” from occurring, but can also ensure that all evaluations lead to identical marginal total results. This procedure, optimized for both such issues, means that distortions are inevitable even for more frequently occurring fields in the table.
- Moreover, the administrative register cannot completely fulfill the precision requirements for statistics of a population register. For instance, the deadline date excerpt contains listings of noncurrent residents and cases of non-registration of actual residents, due to moves, births and deaths.
These limitations have to be taken into account when interpreting the figures.
The sizes of the particular blocks and block segments have been calculated directly from the block map ISU5 1:5000.