Deriving household composition using population-scale Electronic Health Record data – a reproducible methodology

Background Physical housing and household composition have an important role in the lives of individuals and drive health and social outcomes, and inequalities. Most methods to understand housing composition are based on survey or census data, and there is currently no reproducible methodology for creating population-level household composition measures using linked administrative data. Methods Using existing, and more recent enhancements to the address-data linkage methods in the SAIL Databank using Residential Anonymised Linking Fields we linked individuals to properties using the anonymised Welsh Demographic Service data in the SAIL Databank. We defined households, household size, and household composition measures based on adult to child relationships, and age differences between residents to create relative age measures. Results Two relative age-based algorithms were developed and returned similar results when applied to population and household-level data, describing household composition for 3.1 million individuals within 1.2 million households in Wales. Developed methods describe binary, and count level generational household composition measures. Conclusions Improved residential anonymised linkage field methods in SAIL have led to improved property-level data linkage, allowing the design and application of household composition measures that assign individuals to shared residences and allow the description of household composition across Wales. The reproducible methods create longitudinal, household-level composition measures at a population-level using linked administrative data. Such measures are important to help understand more detail about an individual’s home and area environment and how that may affect the health and wellbeing of the individual, other residents, and potentially into the wider community.