FAQs: InFuse: UK Data Service

FAQs

Who can access InFuse

Anyone can access InFuse. InFuse is an open access tool.

Which data are available for which countries?

Some topics are only available for some countries. Where this is the case, we indicate this by inserting the following:

E - England
N - Northern Ireland
S - Scotland
W - Wales

If a topic does not have a letter then the topic is available across the UK. However, a topic may be available for all countries, but not when in combination with another. The two topic combinations below are only available for Scotland, as one of the topics is listed with an [S]

BUT, and there is a big BUT:

This system is not foolproof, and won't filter out everything. For example, the following topic combination is only available for Northern Ireland. The reason it doesn't have "[N]" is because in isolation the two topics that make up this combination are available for all the other countries. We do not currently have an indicator for actual topics combinations, this is something we would like to implement in the future.

accomodation and central heating topic combination

Not all categories are available for all countries / geographies.

Even if a topic is available for a country, it is possible that only some categories are available for a specific country.

There is also an issue with data granularity. The census agencies did not produce data at all levels. In particular you will find that less categories are available at the lower geographic levels.

When I click the "add" button on the the Categories page (step 2), I get a "You have selected 0 category combinations". Why can't I select any data?

This message may be legitimate, as not all category combinations are available. If you have ticked all category combinations and still get this message then you are seeing a bug. There is a work-around:

Select all possible categories, if you have selected everything and still receive the warning message then you have encountered a bug
De-select all category checkboxes that only have one option
Click on the 'Add' button. This will generate red error messages
Re-select all categories
Click on the 'Add' button again. This should add your category combinations to the box.

If this doesn't work, we recommend closing all of your browser windows and reselecting the data.

Why am I finding different values from the 2001 Census in InFuse compared to Casweb (or other census applications)?

To prevent the inadvertent disclosure of information a number of disclosure protection methods were applied to the 2001 census outputs. One such method used was Small Cell Adjustment, this is where small counts in tables were adjusted slightly in the English, Welsh and Northern Irish censuses (but not in Scotland). Tables were independently adjusted (this means that counts of the same population in two different tables may not necessarily be the same). This presented us with a challenge as we required a unique value for each count.

We dealt with this issue by selecting the value from the simplest table, which should have the lowest possibility of modification.

I've downloaded some data and found that for some geographies I have blank cells - why is that?

During Step 2 you will have picked your categories. We use your selection as a method of eliminating geographies where no data exists. However, the problem is that you may have picked two categories, one which is available for a certain geography and one which is not. In this situation it is possible to get blank data for some (but not all) of your geography selections. If you require data for a certain geography, then go back to Step 2 and select different categories (e.g. if you were looking at age groups you could use 50 to 59 years old instead of 50 to 54 years old)

Why is there such strange age groups in Step 2

We spent some time deconstructing the tables, as we noticed that people often didn't realise that similar data was in different tables. Take a look at the topic combination below for the Age|Travel to work|Sex topic combination. This example below shows that data came from two different tables - these two different tables used different age groupings (when crossed with Sex and Travel to work).

age combinations

I've downloaded some data from InFuse - how do I find out what table it originally came from?

This information is in the Meta file which is bundled with your results. Specifically Column B which is named CENSUS_CELLNAME. The first part of the code is the table name (e.g. ST020), and the second part of the code is the cell ID (e.g. 0003)

Where can I find 2001 census data for Scotland and Northern Ireland, and data for earlier censuses

We are working on getting this data into InFuse, in the mean time you can find this data in Casweb

How do I cite data

Take a look at the Citing Data page

InFuse