Amy Bonsall, one of our interns talks about how she approached the task of working out how to calculate Townsend scores and then of finding others work to compare against as a way to quality assure the methodology.
As part of the internship project to calculate deprivation scores after finding sources that provide an outline of how to calculate Townsend Deprivation Scores it was important to ensure the methodology would produce scores that matched those already published.
We wanted to calculate scores and compare romania rcs data them to those that had already been calculated by using the same dataset to be sure we were using the same methodology. Whilst I was focused on this, Sanah Yousaf, my partner in this internship, was creating an R script to calculate the scores. Whilst this was being developed I used Excel to calculate the scores. This was not only because we did not yet have an R script but also because I was already comfortable with Excel and it made it easy to visualise the results of each step in the calculation.
Replicating scores proved more difficult than anticipated. Not only were there limited resources of published scores but we also found that many of the people who had already calculated scores had access to unadjusted census data meaning we had different outcomes. The main problem here was, there was no way of knowing if the different data was the only reason for contrasting scores or if it could have also been down to a different formula.