CDU data science team blog: Age bands methodology

Zoë Turner

Age Bands

On the face of it applying age bands to data analysis is simple, you need to consider the start and end ages and group up the rest into reasonable groups. However, if you want to use the data to compare to other sources of aggregate data it needs to be grouped in a similar way.

Friends and Family questionnaires

Trusts can control some of the data they collect for the Friends and Family questionnaires and Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust have used a grouped age question to anonymise responses from patients. Our feedback can be analysed through the shiny app with code here.

SUCE (Service User and Carers Experience) survey:

Under 12
12-17
18-25
26-39
40-64
65-79
80+ years
Refused
Missing

SUCE (Service User and Carers Experience) survey - under 12 years specific

Under 6
6 to 8
9 to 11
2 to 17
18+ years

National Workforce Dataset

The National Workforce Dataset (ESR values) use ages grouped like from the Age profile projection model which uses:

<20
20-24
25-29
30-34
35-39
40-44
45-49
50-54
55-59
60-64
65-69
70+

Office of National Statistics (ONS) - population projections

Also see: https://cdu-data-science-team.github.io/team-blog/posts/2021-06-22-population-projections-websites/

Age bands from population projections are:

0-4
5-9
10-14
15-19
20-24
25-29
30-34
35-39
40-44
45-49
50-54
55-59
60-64
65-69
70-74
75-79
80-84
85-89
90 and over

Office of National Statistics (ONS) - survey best practice

There are various suggested age bands for surveys which are listed on this Wikimedia page.

NHS Staff Survey

Information on the NHS Staff Survey has changed in how it was published but the latest website (as of June 2021) has the dashboard with age bands as:

16-20
21-30
31-40
41-50
51-65
66+

Corrections

If you see mistakes or want to suggest changes, please create an issue on the source repository.

Citation

For attribution, please cite this work as

Turner (2021, June 22). CDU data science team blog: Age bands methodology. Retrieved from https://cdu-data-science-team.github.io/team-blog/posts/2021-06-22-age-bands-methodology/

BibTeX citation

@misc{turner2021age,
  author = {Turner, Zoë},
  title = {CDU data science team blog: Age bands methodology},
  url = {https://cdu-data-science-team.github.io/team-blog/posts/2021-06-22-age-bands-methodology/},
  year = {2021}
}