Volunteered Geographic Information

On friday (10/07) I attended a workshop on the usage of the Output Area Classification (OAC), aimed at local government and the public sector. I have experimented with a number of geodemographic classifcations, both commercial (experian’s mosaic, CACI’s acorn and health acorn) and non-commercial (OAC and Petersen et al’s LOAC (2007)) and was interested to see the experienced line up presenting.

Tim Allen of the LGA introduced why customer insight is increasingly important, in the public sector this translates to understanding the situation and needs of your constituents, and directing spending accordingly. This introduction of the potential of OAC in the public sector pushes the merits it holds to assess neighbourhoods, communities and places. This trinity was oft mentioned, however I am suspicious that they were being conflated to mean similar things when in fact OAC is only realistically a window into neighbourhood/areal characteristics.

Second up was Dan Vickers of Sheffield University, who developed the OAC for the Office for national statistics, who went onto describe some of the characteristics of OAC and the decisions that went into its construction.

The remaining sessions focused on how OAC can be used to examine dataset and find trends, Martin Callingham, visiting Professor at the University of London, showed its use in profiling populations, essentially tagging locational data with the appropriate group and comparing it to the national average. In doing this he gave a lot of examples, but went onto describe OAC as fundamentally being about ‘place’ something I’m not convinced is true.

Likewise John Fisher of local futures, described how OAC can tell “stories of Britain”, which brings the work of Doreen Massey to mind, the idea of place being the composite of “stories so far”, however this is a post-structuralist view of place-construction which itsn’t reflected in the way OAC is cast, with strongly defined boundaries, absolute assignments and statistical relevance. Fisher brings in further element of government into the OAC agenda, referencing ‘place-shaping’ and ‘total place’, sustainable communities and localism. All elements which OAC may have a role in, but a role that needs careful shapign and consideration not broad geodemographic strokes.

Keith Dugmore, of Demographic Decisions, was more measured in his talk, which was quite interesting and revealed a geodemographic approach to assessing sample surveys, this is achieved through OAC coded surveys such as the British Household Panel Survey, or the Expenditure and Food Survey and allow for small area estimates for local areas based on the results of these surveys. The key failing picked up was a lack of confidence intervals, but these are easily added in reality.

Michael Willmott wrapped things up with a forward looking commentary on the trajectory of OAC and social research, unfortunately given apparent inability to distinguish neighbourhoods, communities, and places in some of the talks, and amongst some of the participants, it may have been overly optimistic.

I do think that geodemographic classifications have a role to play, simply that there needs to be a greater understandng of how they are best interpretted.