Understanding Society User Support

Hi,

I’d be very grateful for some advice please regarding BHPS mover data and Special License casward georeference data.

I’m using data from waves 6-16 of BHPS to analyse the relationship between health status and the geography of moves in the UK. I’m focusing on moves over one year between adjacent waves of the BHPS from waves 6-16 and pooling data from ten ‘pairs’ of waves for analysis (i.e. moves between w6-w7, w7-w8, w8-w9… w15-w16). The files that I’m using in this analysis are windresp, wcasward & whhsamp.

There seem to be some inconsistencies between the mover status variables and casward of residence variables. There are some cases where individuals are categorised in the data as not having moved residence between adjacent waves of the survey but their ward of residence changes between these waves. For example, I matched files findresp, gindresp, fcasward & gcasward creating a file containing individuals that responded at both waves 6 & 7 and their casward of residence at these waves. There are 25 individuals which the ‘individual mover status’ variable gmovest categories as ‘non-movers’ between waves 6 & 7 that have a different casward of residence at waves 6 & 7. The same issue is found for similar numbers of cases when comparing the wmovest variable and wcasward data for all of the adjacent waves 6-16.

There are also some cases where georeference data is partially missing for ‘non-movers’. For example, when looking at moves between waves 6 & 7 there are 3 cases which are categorised by the variable gmovest at wave 7 as ‘non-movers’ that have a casward code for their residence at wave 6 but do not have a casward for ward of residence at wave 7. I wondered why if the ward of residence was known at wave 6 and these individuals did not move that their casward was missing at the subsequent wave?

I also wanted to ask please about the ECHP NI caswards. The wcasward files I have been using do not contain data for ECHP NI cases. These files however do contain caswards for the other ECHP cases (ECHP SCPR and ECHP ONS) and the NI new sample cases. ECHP NI cases seem to be the only BHPS sample type without casward georeferences. I wondered if there was a reason why caswards could not be attached to the ECHP NI cases or if the caswards might be missing in error? Apologies if I have overlooked the explanation for this in the documentation.

Thank you very much.

Kind regards, Helena