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Support #257

Residential mobility and LSOA codes

Added by Rory Coulter almost 10 years ago. Updated almost 10 years ago.

Status:
Closed
Priority:
Normal
Assignee:
-
Category:
Special license
Start date:
05/02/2014
% Done:

100%


Description

Hi Jakob,

Apologies for the long post. I'm using UKHLS studies SN6614 and SN7248 (Special License Census 2011 LSOA codes) and have a couple of queries about residential mobility and the geocodings in the data.

1. First I was wondering if you could advise as to whether there is any best practice as to how to derive an indicator of individual residential mobility for waves 2 and 3 of UKHLS. This was quite easy in BHPS as there was a 'movest' variable coding whether the person changed address since the last wave. BHPS also had the 'plnew' question and this could be compared with movest to easily derive a mobility dummy. Neither of these options seems to be available in UKHLS as plnew is no longer asked and there is no movest equivalent. From previous forum posts I can see that there are several ways mobility could be defined, although each has problems:

a) Using xwhist on xwavedat - although it is not entirely clear what a change in postcode actually means. Is this a move over any distance or could the person have moved within their postcode area without this being recorded?
b) By comparing LSOA/datazones at t-1 with t (more on this below)
c) Using the origadd and reasons for moving variables derived from the questionnaires-although the origadd indicator seems to be derived at the household not individual level. Am I correct in assuming that this means that people are only routed towards the reasons for moving questions in the annual event module if their whole household had moved since t-1? This is quite different from BHPS and it seems odd given that households are not consistent units through time.

My current approach is to try and do all of these and somehow triangulate them into a new variable. Does this seem appropriate or is there something really obvious I am missing? In any case it would be very useful to have a simple 'residential move since last wave' dummy in UKHLS (like movest in BHPS). Are there any plans to produce such a variable?

2. I have some concerns about some of the LSOA/datazone information in SN7248. The study documentation tells us that at wave 2 37500 households had postcodes matched to their records and this was 35128 at wave 3. However in the SN7248 there are lots of hidp records with blank micro-geographic codes (5315 at wave 1; 3719 at wave 2; 3320 at wave 3). This isn't mentioned in the study documentation. Is there any reason for this discrepancy with the number of households with valid postcodes? I merged the LSOA identifiers onto the hhsamp files and most of these cases seem to come from Scottish households, many of whom completed full or proxy interviews.

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.

Best wishes,
Rory

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