Getting Started! : Creating Geodemographic Profiles
Geodemographic profiles are summary statistics which show how the classification categories of a target population compare with that of a base population. An example of a target population could be all those students attending a Higher Education institution (HE), and the bases population all students in HE. The geodemographic profile would show which OAC categories were overrepresented in this HE institution compared to the average of all institutions.
Creating the target counts
The first step is to create a count of all those individuals in your data by OAC Sub-Group. This forms your target population distribution and requires going back to the database created in the previous section “Importing your data into the OAC classification database”. Once the database is open, click on Queries on the database dialog window, then double click “create query in Design view”. The “Show Tables” dialog box should now be open. Click on the “Queries” tab, and from the list click on “User Query”, then click the button “Add”, then click “Close”. In the design view query window which opens, move the mouse over the gridded section and right click. From the popup menu that opens click on “Totals”. Click in the upper right white box next to the words “Field:” and select from the drop down menu “SUB”. Check that in the box next to the word “Total”, the words “Group by” have appeared. If not, select this option from the dropdown menu. In the next set of boxes, click again in the top box (next to the word SUB, and on the line which states “Field:”), then select “SUB” again from the dropdown box. However, this time select “Count” from the drop down menu instead on the “Totals Line”. Click the red cross in the top right of the design view query window and then “Yes” confirming that you want to save the query. A new dialog box will open up asking you to specify a name for the query. Call the query “Group Query” and click “OK”. In the database dialog window on the “Queries” tab, a new query will be present called “Group Query”. Double click this query to create the dataset of counts by OAC Sub-Groups. This query should be exported as an Excel file using the method described at the end of the previous section “Profiling your data”.
Creating an index table and graph.
The Spatial Literacy team at UCL (http://www.spatial-literacy.org) have provided a profiler application built in Microsoft Excel. The application can be downloaded from [here]. The application lets users input a series of counts for OAC Sub-Groups, such as those created from the database query. The application calculates an index score for each Sub-Group and draws a graph. The base used in these calculations is the total UK population.
