The UK has a growing ageing population 1, which is a threat to the economic output of the country. With this fact, it was hypothesised that this demographic shift would suggest a reduction in the working population. Preliminary analysis of the 2011 and 2021 census data 2 3 for England and Wales validated the initial hypothesis to an extent; however, there were several regions which suggested that age was not the only reason for a decrease in the employment rate. As such it was thought that education might be a contributing factor due to its intrinsic link with work 4. This gave rise to the overarching question for exploratory analysis: what is the relationship between economic activity and education in England and Wales in 2021? To answer the main question, two sub-questions were curated based on the available census data:
- What is the age/gender demographic relationship between economic activity and qualification level?
- What is the relationship between working conditions and qualification level?
Using Munzer’s task taxonomy 5 a Tableau storyboard (2011 & 2021 UK Census EDA.twbx), consisting of three dashboards, was produced to demonstrate the preliminary analysis and the two sub-questions. The visualisation was made with the consideration that the primary user would be a non-domain specialist in the given socio-economic areas who may also use the storyboard to answer personal research questions or for exploration. As such the three key requirements were:
- Visualisations must be easy to interpret in terms of what each view shows
- Filters/interactivity must be kept intuitive
- Dashboards can be used as standalone visualisation tools for personal exploration
The process of building the visualisation was documented in the 2011 & 2021 UK Census Report.pdf
Footnotes
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Bayliss, J., & Sly, F. (2010). Ageing across the UK. Regional Trends, 42, 2-28. ↩
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Office for National Statistics. (2011). 2011 Census. Retrieved 12/05/2024 from https://www.nomisweb.co.uk/sources/census_2011 ↩
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Office for National Statistics. (2021). 2021 Census - Office for National Statistics. Retrieved 12/05/2024 from https://www.ons.gov.uk/census ↩
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Levin, H. M. (1987). Work and education. In Economics of education (pp. 146-157). Elsevier. ↩
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Munzer, T. (2014). Visualization Analysis & Design. Taylor & Francis Group. ↩