Getting value from OAC: training course, 24 March 2009

An OACUG course specially designed to provide a hands on introduction to organising data and analysis by OAC will be held on 24 March 2009 in London. The full day course is an updated version of the one successfully held in June 2008. For more details and about how to reserve a place:

Getting Value out of OAC

Training course 24 March 2009

A hands-on training course on how to use and get value from the National Statistics geodemographic Output Area Classification (OAC), which is freely available in the public domain, is being repeated by the OAC User Group after successful inauguration in June 2008.

The course will be given by Martin Callingham, Visiting Professor at the School of Geography, Birkbeck College, London University, and Dr Tom Smith, Director, Oxford Consultants on Social Inclusion.

The one day course will be held at the Royal Statistical Society, 12 Errol Street, EC1Y 8LX on Tuesday 24 March 2009, with a fee of £125 (no VAT payable). It has been arranged in conjunction with the RSS Statistics Users Forum (SUF), to which the OAC User Group is affiliated, and income will go to SUF.

How to reserve a place

Please contact Chris Denham (chrisdenham@waitrose.com) to reserve a place on the course by 16 February if possible, or to express an interest in joining the course, and please do not hesitate to contact Martin Robson with any queries. A booking form and invoice to be returned to the RSS will be sent to those who have reserved a place. Further information will also be provided to participants in advance of the course

Hands-on training

A limit of twenty places will allow an intensive and practical approach. Participants will be asked to bring a laptop with Excel and Access installed (an alternative to Access would be SPSS or some other software which will enable records from separate files to be joined through a common variable). It would also be an advantage if participants had a GIS installed, together with the Census Output Area (OA) boundary files.

Participants will also be encouraged to bring their own postcoded data files, though this is not a necessary requirement. The training will cover all the basic requirements of the software to achieve value from the use of OAC, though it would be expected that most participants have familiarity with at least Excel and preferable Access.

Course objectives

Specific objectives are:
- understand what OAC is, its advantages and disadvantages over proprietary systems.
- be able to profile people post-coded files, calculate indices (relative propensity) and chart.
- use a market research or social survey table to estimate absolute propensities for OAC groups.
- be able to estimate behavioural or characterising values (e.g. income) for a people group, e.g. users of a library.
- be able to profile a bespoke geographical area (e.g. a Local Authority) and model behavioural estimates or resource demands for it (either relative or absolute).
- be able to map behavioural or resource estimates and debate the relative merits of using different ways of expressing the values.
- understand the opportunities of accessing an open geodemographic system (making ones own systems, further analysis, etc).
- use of the OAC variable database.

Material supplied with the course

The following data will be supplied as part of the course, and may be retained by participants for further use:
- postcode to OA look-up file (GB)
- OA to OAC file (GB) with resident and household counts
- customer profiles of three newspapers (Sun, Telegraph and Guardian)
- rates of the incidence of some diseases by OAC sub groups
- the OAs that comprise the urban areas of South Tyneside and Wokingham
- a reduced London OA file containing OAC, residents and household counts and output area areas (hectares)

In addition, two PowerPoint presentations will be given and copies provided:
- what are geodemographics and OAC in particular?
- the advantages of an open geodemographic system together with a detailed set of course notes.

Generous help from the Demographic User Group

The design of this course was originally funded by the Demographic User Group which is offering it to support the use of OAC in the wider community.