Understanding Society User Support

Good afternoon –

I’m writing regarding the BHPS. (specifically years 1998 and 2008)

For my purposes (analysing car ownership) it would be most helpful to be able to identify whether BHPS respondents were living in urban areas in each wave. The ideal definition for my study would be if ‘urban’ can be defined as urban areas of 250K+ population, and all else ‘not urban’.

It looks to me like the xREGION variable has some information on this: e.g. respondents living in London or Greater Manchester are clearly living in an urban area. But, for instance, for respondents living in Scotland this is ambiguous: they may live in Edinburgh or in a very rural area and which is not knowable from either the xREGION or xREGION2 variables.

Is there a way to access such a variable – a simple binary 0/1 variable that identifies HHs living in urban areas of over 250K pop would work perfectly for my study.

Many thanks!--

--Scott

Scott Le Vine
Centre for Transport Studies, Imperial College London
slevine@imperial.ac.uk