ECHILD How To Guides
Welcome
Welcome to the ECHILD How To Guides! Here you will find a series of guides that will help you extract and manage data in ECHILD, along with full example scripts. The guides will take you from cohort inception, to extracting exposure, outcome and covariate data and producing an analysis-ready dataset. This resource is provided without any warranty.
How to use the guides
The twelve guides are designed to be read in order, start to finish, with their scripts to hand. They are intended to be self-explanatory, at least in terms of the concepts covered. We have in mind a typical researcher interested in answering their substantive research problem but who may be less experienced in the necessary data management steps that come with administrative data. The scripts are written as simply as possible, bearing in mind ECHILD’s inherent complexity. Each guide is accompanied by at least one, full R script. You are encouraged to study them carefully, line by line, working with the data to fully understand what they are doing.
You are free to use and adapt the material on this site as you wish. Indeed, given that different ECHILD projects will usually have access to different modules of data (e.g., not every project uses all of the health data, different projects cover different years), you will have to adapt the scripts to some extent or another. Because ECHILD links together pre-existing datasets, users outside of ECHILD are, of course, also more than welcome to use this resource. We would appreciate it if you would include an appropriate citation should you do so.
Access the guides from the navigation pane to the left or here:
- Guide 1: introduction
- Guide 2: script management, coding principles and working in the SRS
- Guide 3: identify a cohort and create a cohort spine
- Guide 4: NPD demographic and SEND data
- Guide 5: HES demographic data (your turn!)
- Guide 6: birth characteristics
- Guide 7: phenotyping
- Guide 8: enrolment, exclusions and absence
- Guide 9: exams
- Guide 10: outpatients
- Guide 11: combine it all together
- Guide 12: children’s social care
You can also view a glossary of key terms.
More information and help about ECHILD can be found on our main website, the user guide, the ECHILD Code List Repository and the discussion forum.
ECHILD
ECHILD is Education and Child Health Insights from Linked Data, which links the National Pupil Database and Hospital Episode Statistics plus other relevant datasets for all of England.
