Classification through consultation: public views of the geography of the e-Society

Abstract

Although viewed by business and commerce as successful solutions, geodemographic profiling of neighbourhoods has attracted wide-ranging criticism in the academic literature. This paper addresses some specific concerns that arise because the derivation of classifications is rarely transparent and open to scrutiny or challenge. The substantive focus of the research reported in this paper is a nationwide geodemographic classification of how people engage with new information and communication technologies (ICTs). In response to the critique of geodemographics as a ‘black box’ technology, we describe how the classification was opened up to public scrutiny and how we conducted a major consultation exercise into the reliability of its results. We assess the message of the 50,000+ searches and 3952 responses collected during the consultation exercise, in terms of possible systematic errors in the shape and detail of the classification. Unusually for Internet-based surveys, we also investigate the likely reliability of the response information received and identify ways in which the outcome of consultation might be used to improve the classification. We believe that this is the first-ever large-scale consultation survey of the validity and remit of a geodemographic classification and that it may have wider implications for the creation of geodemographic classifications.

Keywords:

• Geodemographics
• Information and communications technologies
• e-Society

Acknowledgements

This research was funded by ESRC Grant RES-335-25-0020 and supplementary funding from the ESRC e-Society Programme Director Roger Burrows. The website www.spatialliteracy.org is part of the HEFCE-funded ‘Spatial Literacy in Teaching’ (Splint) Centre of Excellence in Teaching and Learning. The authors are very grateful to Experian Ltd. for the supply of data to the project.

Notes

1. www.york.ac.uk/res/e-Society/

2. The BBC news feature did not make clear that the classification was only of residential postcodes and consequently some searches, possibly made by office workers during business hours, concerned non-residential postcodes. Other ‘invalid’ postcodes included those of recent inception (e.g. identifying new build properties) and those that had been changed in the period subsequent to creation of our classification.

3. A common practice in commercial geodemographics is to use index values instead of absolute frequencies in order to gauge the over- or underrepresentation of population characteristics. We do not adopt this practice here, however, because the consultative nature of our investigation requires that we do not accept that the total assignments of postcodes to Types are inevitably correct.

4. An exception in the UK is CACI Ltd.’s ACORN system, which is available to public access through the www.upmystreet.com neighbourhood profiling site, responses from which are used to refine the system (John Rae, personal communication).

5. Elements along the principal diagonal of the main table identify feedback responses where respondents have identified a different Type within the same modelled Group as being more appropriate. As such this 4.7% of usable responses can be considered to be ‘near misses’.