Rabia Butt, one of our summer Q-Step interns, explains the process she went through to calculate and map the Carstairs deprivation index using UK Census data.
After downloading the data needed for the research to measure deprivation, some issues were recognised. Therefore, we needed to make some changes.
Those that were used by published research papers, it was quite a challenge. This is because even though the research papers used Carstairs methods where by definition the census variables japan rcs data needed to refer to households. However, the social class had to be changed from head of household in a lower social class to per person because the data from Scotland did not include household references for social class.
To make comparisons across the UK, the per person variable was employed and to replicate our calculations with the research papers as well. There was no other research paper that calculated the whole of the UK. Most research papers used Scotland census only and some were of England and Wales together but not with the other countries in the UK.
For our investigation, the calculations for the Carstairs scores were performed in R, which required the import of a dataset with the relevant variables for the calculation. The reason for choosing R for the analysis is the large quantity of data we were handling and the numbers of calculation we needed to make. R has the capabilities of being able to produce results for large quantity of data, which makes R irreplaceable for this sort of research.