Project overview
Census 2022: Transforming Small Area Socio-Economic Indicators through ‘Big Data’ was a project funded by the ESRC Transformative Research 2012/2013.
The possible demise of the decennial UK Census presents social, policy and commercial researchers with both a challenge and an opportunity:
- The challenge is to transform ‘census-taking’ by finding robust alternative methods for creating traditional (‘census-like’ indicators) small area socio-economic indicators over time.
- The opportunity is to transform the very nature of the socio-economic indicators themselves (‘census-plus’ indicators) using new analytic methods applied to new geo-coded datasets and to radically accelerate the temporal cycle from decennial to annual or sub-annual production. If we are no longer to be restricted to what can be asked in a Census, then what kinds of social indicators might we want or be able to produce, how regularly and what forms of novel social, policy and commercial analysis might this then underpin?
This project addressed these questions using existing large-scale geo-coded transactional datasets held at the University of Southampton.
The possible demise of the decennial UK Census presents social, policy and commercial researchers with both a challenge and an opportunity:
- The challenge is to transform ‘census-taking’ by finding robust alternative methods for creating traditional (‘census-like’ indicators) small area socio-economic indicators over time.
- The opportunity is to transform the very nature of the socio-economic indicators themselves (‘census-plus’ indicators) using new analytic methods applied to new geo-coded datasets and to radically accelerate the temporal cycle from decennial to annual or sub-annual production. If we are no longer to be restricted to what can be asked in a Census, then what kinds of social indicators might we want or be able to produce, how regularly and what forms of novel social, policy and commercial analysis might this then underpin?
This project addressed these questions using existing large-scale geo-coded transactional datasets held at the University of Southampton.
Staff
Other researchers
Collaborating research institutes, centres and groups
Research outputs
Ben Anderson, Sharon Lin, Andy Newing, Abubakr Bahaj & Patrick James,
2017, Computers, Environment and Urban Systems, 63, 58-67
Type: article
A. Newing, B. Anderson, A.S. Bahaj & P.A.B. James,
2015, Population, Space and Place, 1-13
DOI: 10.1002/psp.1972
Type: article