coedata

coedata is a data package that serves up various datasets made available by the Church of England’s Data Services team. Data sources include:

• Parish, diocese and national-level 2021 census data (Updated November 2024)
• A database of Churches, Parishes, Dioceses and other geographies (Updated November 2024)
• Parish-level data from the 2019 Index of Multiple Deprivation (Updated November 2024)

Installation

You can install the development version of coedata from GitHub with:

# install.packages("pak")
pak::pak("Church-Army/coedata")

Documentation

Full documentation website on: https://Church-Army.github.io/coedata

Usage

Using coedata to get parish-level census statistics

This is an example of how you could use coedata to get 2021 census data on general health for a selection of parishes. We’ll use the neighbouring parishes of Stifford: St Mary and Grays: St Peter and St Paul.

To get this data, we’ll need:

• The parish codes of those parishes
• The ONS ID of the general health dataset

We can find the ONS ID of the general health dataset by using coe_datasets(), which lists the ID of every census dataset that’s a available through this package:

coe_census_datasets() |> 
  knitr::kable()

ons_id	description
TS001	TS001 - Number of usual residents in households and communal establishments
TS004	TS004 - Country of birth
TS007A	TS007A - Age by 5 year age bands
TS021	TS021 - Ethnic group
TS030	TS030 - Religion
TS037	TS037 - General health
TS062	TS062 - Social Classification (NS-SeC)
TS066	TS066 - Economic activity status
TS067	TS067 - Highest level of qualification
TS011	TS011 - Households by deprivation dimensions
TS025	TS025 - Household language
TS044	TS044 - Accommodation type
TS045	TS045 - Car or van availability
TS054	TS054 - Tenure
TS003	TS003 - Household composition

We can see that general health data can be found in the dataset with ID TS037.

Luckily, we already know the parish codes for the parishes we’re interested in. If you’re not sure where to find the parish codes you need, please refer to Finding parish codes.

Now that we have the ONS ID and the parish codes, we can get our census data:

coe_census_parish(ons_id = "TS037", parish_codes = c(580342, 580334))
#> ✔ Reading from "coedata_parish-data".
#> ✔ Range ''TS037''.
#> Church of England Census Data
#> TS037 - General health 
#> Units:  persons 
#> # A tibble: 2 × 7
#>   parish_code population general_health_very_good general_health_good
#>   <chr>            <dbl>                    <dbl>               <dbl>
#> 1 580334           49315                   26735.              16254.
#> 2 580342            6332                    2956.               2160.
#> # ℹ 3 more variables: general_health_fair <dbl>, general_health_bad <dbl>,
#> #   general_health_very_bad <dbl>
#> Parish-level data compiled by the Church of England

Those parishes are both in central London - they are very densely populated!

Note that we can also get relative statistics for the same data by setting relative = TRUE:

coe_census_parish(ons_id = "TS037", parish_codes = c(580342, 580334), relative = TRUE) 
#> Church of England Census Data
#> TS037 - General health 
#> Units:  Proportion of all persons 
#> # A tibble: 2 × 7
#>   parish_code population general_health_very_good general_health_good
#>   <chr>            <dbl>                    <dbl>               <dbl>
#> 1 580334           49315                    0.542               0.330
#> 2 580342            6332                    0.467               0.341
#> # ℹ 3 more variables: general_health_fair <dbl>, general_health_bad <dbl>,
#> #   general_health_very_bad <dbl>
#> Parish-level data compiled by the Church of England

For more information on getting census data, see vignette("coe-census-data").

Using coedata to get parish-level deprivation statistics

The CoE produce deprivation data for every parish in england, which can be accessed like so:

coe_parish_deprivation(parish_codes = c(580342, 580334))
#> ✖ Request failed [429]. Retry 1 happens in 3.4 seconds ...
#> ✖ Request failed [429]. Retry 2 happens in 1.4 seconds ...
#> ✖ Request failed [429]. Retry 3 happens in 18.2 seconds ...
#> ✔ Reading from "coe_parish_imd_2019".
#> ✔ Range ''imd''.
#> Church of England Deprivation Data
#> # A tibble: 2 × 6
#>   parish_code parish_name imd_score imd_rank imd_rank_decile imd_rank_percentile
#>         <dbl> <chr>           <dbl>    <dbl>           <dbl>               <dbl>
#> 1      580334 Grays Thur…      17.2     5293               5                  44
#> 2      580342 Stifford         22.4     2883               3                  24
#> Parish-level data compiled by the Church of England

For more information on getting deprivation data, see vignette("parish-deprivation-data")

Finding parish codes

When you’re looking at individual parishes with coedata, you’ll need to identify them with their unique parish codes. If you’re not sure what the parish code is for a parish or church, you can either:

• Find the parish in the interactive map provided by the Church of England’s Data Services team
• Find the church’s church code by clicking ‘more information’ on its A Church Near You page, and then use coe_parish_from_church() to find it’s parish code.

Thanks and attribution

• All census data was originally provided by the Office for National Statistics. ONS also maintain the nomis service, which was used to source some of this package’s internal data.
• Parish-level census data profiles were compiled by Ken Eames, who is a senior statistical researcher at the Church of England’s Data Services. Original parish-level datasets are available on the Church of England website
  • Ken also maintains the parish map from which Church data are read by this package. Thanks again, Ken!
• Thanks to ropensci for their development and maintenance of the nomisr package, which was used to interface with nomis.
• Thanks to Jenny Bryan at Posit for the development and maintenance of googlesheets4, which provided a simple, secure way of minimising package size by storing data remotely.