Clean demographic variables

Creates variables for ethnicity, sex and quintiles of the Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMDQ).

clean_demographic(data)

Arguments

data

Data table - the Health Survey for England/Scotland Health Survey dataset.

Value

  • ethnicity_4cat: 4 level variable (see above).

  • ethnicity_2cat: 2 level variable (white/nonwhite).

  • sex: m/f

  • imd_quintile

Details

See below

Sex

1 = Male, 2 = Female.

Index of Multiple Deprivation quintiles

5_most_deprived, 4, 3, 2, 1_least_deprived. The Scottish Health Survey uses the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation. This is kept as a separate variable to the English IMD variable as each country calculated its own slightly different version of IMD. However, there has been a study harmonising IMD measures across the four UK nations Abel et al. (2016) that could be looked at in the future if we want to compare across countries.

Ethnicity

In an attempt to harmonise different years of data to the recommended definitions, we have pooled the Asian and other categories.

  • White (English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, other European)

  • Mixed / multiple ethnic groups

  • Asian / Asian British (includes African-Indian, Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi), plus Other ethnic group (includes Chinese, Japanese, Philippino, Vietnamese, Arab)

  • Black / African / Caribbean / Black British (includes Caribbean, African)

Following inspection of the data, the white/non-white classification does look appropriate, especially given the likely limited sample sizes - so the 2 level variable has also been created.

For 2008-2013 of the Scottish Health Survey, we can create the same 4-category variable as for the HSE, however for 2014 onwards, the Scottish Health Survey 2018 only identifies 5 groups of ethnicity:

  • White (Scottish)

  • White (Other British)

  • White (Other)

  • Asian

  • Other minority ethnic

On the basis of this, only the 2 level variable (white/non-white) has been created for all years for Scotland.

References

Abel GA, Barclay ME, Payne RA (2016). “Adjusted indices of multiple deprivation to enable comparisons within and between constituent countries of the UK including an illustration using mortality rates.” BMJ open, 6(11), e012750.

Examples


if (FALSE) {

data_2001 <- read_2001()

data_2001 <- clean_demographic(data = data_2001)

}