Biomedical subjects
Publications and source records attributed to S Openshaw.
The place of residence of all cases of childhood cancer occurring in the Northern Region from 1968 to 1982 has been analysed by electoral wards. The wards have been ranked according to rate and Poisson probability. Both rankings show a wide geographical scatter throughout the region of areas with an apparent excess incidence of cancer. These areas are not confined to the Cumbrian coast.
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The author examines problems related to the fact that in many countries, census data are only reported for areal units and not at the individual level. Attention is paid to the question of ecological fallacy problems that arise from this situation. Data from a 10 percent sample of the United Kingdom population and individual census data from Italy are used to illustrate the problem. "It is concluded that ecological fallacy effects are endemic to areal census data, although their magnitude is perhaps not as large as might have been expected. The principal difficulty is that there is at present no way of predicting in advance the degree of severity likely to be associated with particular variables and particular techniques. Finally, a suggestion is made concerning how the potentially serious practical consequences can be reduced."
This study is concerned with the evaluation of the various models including time-series forecasts, extrapolation, and projection procedures, that have been developed to prepare population forecasts for planning purposes. These models are evaluated using data for the Netherlands. "As part of a research project at the Erasmus University, space-time population data has been assembled in a geographically consistent way for the period 1950-1979. These population time series are of sufficient length for the first 20 years to be used to build models and then evaluate the performance of the model for the next 10 years. Some 154 different forecasting models for 832 municipalities have been evaluated. It would appear that the best forecasts are likely to be provided by either a Holt-Winters model, or a ratio-correction model, or a low order exponential-smoothing model."
The authors introduce a new map of Britain, which is based on the city region concept and designed specifically to present data from the 1981 census. The primary purposes of this article are "to describe the main problems and distortions which result from using current administrative areas, outline the key features of the new way of defining British cities, and demonstrate the value of the new geographical framework with some basic statistics on city size and population trends."
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Explore the source record for details and available documents.
Explore the source record for details and available documents.