Abstract
In the absence of a comprehensive population registration system in the United Kingdom (UK), the decadal Census of Population provides a crucially important source of demographic and socio-economic data both for academic research as well as planning and policy making for urban sustainability. Data from recent UK censuses have been used to produce a variety of products in digital form at different spatial scales, ranging from the counts of individuals or households with particular characteristics captured by the census questionnaire and often referred to as aggregate statistics, to samples of the population at individual or household level, known collectively as micro data. Access to these often large and complex data sets for social science research has been facilitated through the development of a set of services funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) under the Census Programme. In this chapter, we review the current Census Support Service at a point of transition to a more integrated system allowing users ‘one stop shop’ access to a range of different data sources, including those associated with the census, through the facility known as the UK Data Service.
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Notes
- 1.
The 2001 Census provides data for 223,060 output areas across the UK.
- 2.
See Statistical Data and Metadata eXchange (SDMX) web site at sdmx.org.
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Acknowledgments
Census output is Crown copyright and is reproduced with the permission of the Controller of HMSO and the Queen’s Printer for Scotland. The Census Programme has been funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the UK Data Service—Census Support is currently being funded by the ESRC.
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Stillwell, J. et al. (2013). Access to UK Census Data for Spatial Analysis: Towards an Integrated Census Support Service. In: Geertman, S., Toppen, F., Stillwell, J. (eds) Planning Support Systems for Sustainable Urban Development. Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography, vol 195. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-37533-0_19
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