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

十年一次的英国人口普查可能即将结束，这给社会、政策和商业研究人员带来了挑战和机遇。挑战在于通过寻找强有力的替代方法来创造传统的小地区社会经济指标（“类似人口普查的”指标），从而改变“人口普查”。机会在于利用应用于新的地理编码数据集的新分析方法来改变社会经济指标本身的性质，并从根本上加速从十年一次生产到年度或分年度生产的时间周期（“人口普查+”指标）。如果我们不再局限于人口普查中可以提出的问题，那么我们可能想要或能够产生什么样的社会指标，这将如何定期和以什么样的形式支撑新的社会，政策和商业分析？该项目将利用南安普顿大学现有的大规模地理编码事务数据集来解决这些问题。其中包括家庭能源监测、历史电话记录和其他形式的数据，该项目将以最近的探索性工作为基础，开发和验证估算小区域“类似人口普查”和“额外人口普查”指标的方法。该项目将测试一系列分析技术的效用，以得出传统的和新的小地区社会经济指标，包括相对简单的比率和分布措施，以及更多的实验性时间序列和概况分析。据我们所知，还没有尝试过这种分析，但是，如果成功，这种方法有可能从根本上改变小区域指标的性质和时间性。来自一系列交易性来源的汇总数据至少每年可以代替类似人口普查的小地区表，从而不仅为时间上细粒度的小地区社会经济趋势观察提供资源，而且也为细粒度的地方干预影响评估提供资源。此外，这些来源也有可能提供全新的、但在时间上同样细致的小地区社会经济指标，从而为调查当地和区域社会经济趋势提供全新的方法。潜在的例子包括从社会交流痕迹中估计基于社会互动的指标和从能源消耗/生产测量中估计社会可持续性指标。该项目将以一系列协调的子项目进行，在不同的数据集上测试不同的技术，所有结果将通过定期更新的项目网站以及工作论文、演讲和期刊文章等常规学术渠道公布。此外，我们将与潜在的研究用户密切合作，特别是国家统计局的“超越2011”团队，他们可能能够在未来的人口普查选择研究中直接利用这项研究。

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.