Tom Wilson - Independent AgeTom Wilson from Independent Age discusses the ‘data accessibility gap’ in the representation of sub-groups of older people and introduces the In Focus: Experiences of older age in England report.
Early on in our research project In Focus: experiences france rcs data of older age in England, I was chatting to our commissioned research partner about the problems we were having finding any information about sub-groups of older people, for example older carers, older Black, Asian, other ethnic minority groups, and older people with mental health conditions.
It seemed there was a ‘data gap’ in these areas.
He quickly corrected me: often the data is often ‘there’ in the sense that it is in the dataset, freely available on the UK Data Service.
However, it doesn’t get published ‘officially’ on (for example) the ONS website or in the DWP’s StatXplore. This means charities can’t access it without some statistical knowledge/expertise/software, creating an unintentional but unfortunate barrier.
This encapsulates one of the biggest challenges for data consumers. If published statistics on a sub-group are not available, and you do not have the expertise to explore the datasets directly (or the money to commission someone to do so), the data might as well not exist.