Volunteered Geographic Information

I’ve been doing some more analysis on the Southwark GP patient register at the household level. After a fair amount of cleaning and interpretation I’ve arrived at the following distribution of households.

There are a number of interesting things to say about this data, not least in the section that I’ve marked ‘larger social groupings’ as it seems to suggest a possible migrant social network effect, as the larger household groupings tend to be of minority ethnic groups, including Nigerians and other Africans, Hispanics and South-East Asians who are perhaps using cross-country social ties as help in getting established when first arriving in the UK. However, visually the shape of the distribution of household occupancy is very distinctive, and actually is very close to an exponential. Here I’ve taken the log of frequency of occurence and plotted the best-fit line through the plot:

This linear trend means that the model log(y) = -0.1635x + 4.602 is a good predictor of the number of Households we can expect to exist in Southwark for a given value of x, or occupancy.

It is not entirely clear however why this situation is the case. Firstly, it may just be an artifact of the data, either of the matching process that has occured between the patient register and OS AddressLayer2, the way that GPs encode patient addresses in the first place, or the fact that the patient register is only a sample of the total population of Southwark, i.e. those people who register with a doctor. Secondly, it may simply be a reflection of the structure of the built environment in Southwark – i.e. what kind of housing is actually available. However, the distribution is also subject to the choices of individuals or groups.

Currently, I am in the process of dissagregating the above characteristics and looking at trends by different population groups.