Clean demographic variables
clean_demographic.RdCreates variables for ethnicity, sex and quintiles of the Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMDQ).
Value
ethnicity_4cat: 4 level variable (see above).
ethnicity_2cat: 2 level variable (white/nonwhite).
sex: m/f
imd_quintile
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 Abel2016;textualhseclean 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.
Examples
if (FALSE) { # \dontrun{
data_2001 <- read_2001()
data_2001 <- clean_demographic(data = data_2001)
} # }