Census 2022: Transforming Small Area Socio-Economic Indicators through 'Big Data'

The potentially imminent 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 small area socio-economic indicators over time ('census-like' indicators). The opportunity is to transform the very nature of the socio-economic indicators themselves 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 ('census-plus' indicators). 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 will address these questions using existing large-scale geo-coded transactional datasets held at the University of Southampton. These include household level energy monitoring, historical telephone call records and other forms of data and the project will build on recent exploratory work to develop and validate methods for estimating small area 'Census-like' and 'Census-plus' indicators. The project will test the utility of a range of analytic techniques for deriving traditional and novel small area socio-economic indicators including relatively simple ratios and distribution measures as well as more experimental temporal sequence and profile analysis.

As far as we are aware no such analysis has been attempted and yet, if successful the approach has the potential to radically transform the nature and temporality of small area indicators. Aggregated data from a range of transactional sources might be able to provide replacements for census-like small area tables on at least an annual basis thus providing a resource not only for temporally fine-grained small area social-economic trend observation but also fine grained local intervention impact assessment. In addition the sources may also have the potential to provide totally new but similarly temporally fine-grained small area socio-economic indicators that can provide radically new ways to investigate local and regional socio-economic trends. Potential examples include the estimation of social-interaction based indicators from social communication traces and social-sustainability indicators from energy consumption/production measurements.

The project will be run as a series of co-ordinated sub-projects testing different techniques on different datasets and all results will be published through a regularly updated project website as well as through the usual academic channels of working papers, presentations and journal articles. In addition we will engage closely with potential research users, in particular the ONS' Beyond 2011 team who may be able to directly exploit the research in their studies of future census-taking options.

A key objective of this project is to support the onward exploitation of the results by appropriate stakeholders. We do not expect to produce robust UK-wide small area indicators but to develop a range of validated approaches to the production of such indicators. Exploitable results will therefore include insights, know-how, data analysis tools and estimation algorithms rather than complete datasets.

Our potential end users include the following key sectors:

Local and national authorities with an interest in small area socio-economic indicators and local area trend/intervention analysis who may be able to apply our results to innovative evidence based policy-making and to influencing public policies and legislation at the local, regional, and national level;

Commercial data owners and analysts who may hold transactional datasets of potential future value or who may be interested in applying the analytic techniques to commercial market research thus potentially supporting the commercialisation and exploitation of knowledge, leading to spin out companies, and the creation of new processes, products and services;

Commercial data aggregators and analysts who will be able to use the results to improve or innovate in in their analytic methods and commercial products thus enhancing the research capacity, knowledge and skills of businesses and organisations;

Local and national organisations with an interest in novel 'sustainable consumption' indicators who can use the results as an input to policy targeting and/or intervention analyses thus potentially contributing to environmental sustainability, protection and impact reduction.

Our strategy for ensuring maximum exploitation of the project results concentrates on raising awareness of our work, engaging and collaborating with potential end users and supporting them in any exploitation.

We will raise awareness of our work with research users through three main channels: The project website will be regularly updated with summary results to be highlighted in our other communications; the project Stakeholder Group (SG) will be carefully selected not only to represent appropriate intra and inter-University interests but also to represent key research users; and we will use predominantly social media (especially twitter and Linkedin) and targeted 'news' articles through the Faculty and University publicity channels.

We will seek to engage future research users in our work firstly through the activities of the Stakeholder Group, secondly through the provision of tailored ad-hoc presentations on our results and thirdly through the rapid publication of project results and data via the project website. Whilst there is insufficient scope within the project's resources to carry out bespoke, user-specified analysis, we anticipate that this Open Research approach will lead to a range of potential future collaborations and we are already engaged in a number of discussions with potential partners. In addition our graduate student research project scheme will develop skiled analytic capacity in a cohort of future 'data scientists'.

The rate of impact could be rapid in the context of exploitation by the ONS' Beyond 2011 project team's ongoing study of options for Census 2021, in the analysis of novel local sustainable consumption indicators and in the generation of skilled graduate student capacity. However other impacts are likely to be longer term with the uptake of new methods and approaches requiring ongoing collaboration or 'people transfer' with or to the relevant sectors.