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

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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.