Health Survey England Additional Analyses, Ethnicity and Health, 2011-2019 Experimental statistics

This report presents findings from the Health Survey for England, analysed by ethnicity.

The Health Survey for England (HSE) is a series of annual surveys, of which the 2019 survey is the twenty ninth. The surveys provide information that cannot be obtained from other sources about the public’s health and associated factors.

The HSE is designed to be representative of individuals living in private households. Since 2011, it has included responses from around 8,000 adults each year.

Each survey in the series includes core questions, and measurements such as blood pressure, height and weight measurements and analysis of blood and saliva samples. In addition, there are modules of questions on specific issues that vary from year to year. Data are collected by a face-to-face interview and a subsequent visit by a research nurse.

The HSE has been designed and carried out since 1994 by the Joint Health Surveys Unit of NatCen Social Research and the Research Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at University College London (UCL).

These results are based on data collected between 2011 and 2019 from adults aged 16 and over, using eleven categories derived from self-identified ethnicity. The findings within this report are based on core survey content that has been included within the survey in most or all of the years between 2011 and 2019.

• Self-assessed general health
• Longstanding conditions
• Prescribed medicines
• Diabetes
• Hypertension (high blood pressure)
• Raised cholesterol
• Mental health and well-being
• Overweight and obesity
• Cigarette smoking
• E-cigarette use
• Drinking alcohol
• Fruit and vegetable consumption
• Physical activity.

For each topic, there is a brief background, including relevant definitions, methods of measurement and the trends for all English adults between 2011 and 2019.

The findings for each group are generally presented for men, women and all adults, except where low numbers of participants make it unreliable to analyse men and women separately.

Estimates are shown as observed (the proportions within each group in the sample) and age-standardised. Age-standardisation takes into account differences in age profiles between groups and is important when comparing health across groups because the prevalence of many health conditions and related behaviours varies markedly with age.

To help assess differences between groups, comparisons are illustrated with charts that show both observed and age-standardised findings, with error bars showing the confidence interval around each age-standardised estimate.

As well as descriptive text and charts, estimates and confidence intervals are shown in the accompanying Excel tables.

These findings are based on a sample and the prevalence figures in this report are estimates assumed to apply to the entire population. These estimates are subject to natural random variation.

Estimates are subject to a margin of error, also known as a 95% confidence interval. For example a survey estimate might be 24% with a 95% confidence interval of 22% to 26%.

Comparisons between groups within the text are based on age-standardised estimates to allow for the differences in age profiles of individual groups. Age-standardised estimates for individual groups, including the confidence intervals, are shown in the charts. Despite aggregating nine years of data small numbers of people within some ethnic groups reported here took part in the survey. This means that the confidence intervals around some estimates are relatively wide.

Where the text states that estimates of prevalence vary between groups, this means that the ethnic groups  do not all have the same prevalence, and that this is statistically significant at the 95% confidence level. In other words, there is a 95% certainty that the variation across all groups is real, and not just within the margins of sampling error.

These tests do not describe differences between any pair of individual groups. When a comparison does not show a statistically significant difference, this will be described using terms such as “similar to” or “the same as", even if individual estimates appear to vary.

Where individual groups are identified within the text as having high or low levels of prevalence, this reflects the overall pattern of difference, but the estimate for a single group may not be significantly different from estimates for other groups if the confidence intervals overlap.

For more information on the tests for significance, see the Technical Appendix to this report.