Glossary

Any illness or injury (including any longstanding condition) that has caused the participant to cut down in the last two weeks on things they usually do.

The HSE FS measured the prevalence of self-reported doctor diagnosed: ‘Do you now have, or have you ever had diabetes?’ and ‘Were you told by a doctor that you had diabetes?’.

The HSE asks about e-cigarettes and other vaping devices, defined as ‘any product that you can use to inhale vapour rather like you would a cigarette. It includes ones that have a battery as well as ones that do not such as voke’.

A fully productive questionnaire was defined as one where the participant completed the survey. A partially productive questionnaire was defined as one where at the household demographics and general health questions were completed but not the whole questionnaire. 

A household is defined as one person or a group of people (not necessarily related) living at the same address who share cooking facilities AND share a living room or sitting room or dining area.

The Index of Multiple Deprivation 2020 combines a number of indicators, chosen to cover a range of economic, social and housing issues, into a single deprivation score for each small area in England. This allows each area to be ranked relative to others according to their level of deprivation. Seven distinct domains have been identified in the English Indices of Deprivation:

• income deprivation
• employment deprivation
• health deprivation
• disability
• education, skills and training deprivation
• barriers to housing and services
• living environment deprivation
• crime

Individual domains can be used in isolation as measures of each specific form of deprivation, as well as using the single overall Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD).

Item non-response is where a participant fails to answer a question in a survey, either in-full or in-part. Item non-response introduces problems such as non-response bias; this is where there are considerable differences in the respondents who participated and those who did not.

Longstanding illness is defined as ‘any physical or mental health condition or illness lasting or expected to last 12 months or more’. This definition changed in 2012; in previous years the question referred to ‘an illness, disability or infirmity… that has troubled you over a period of time or that is likely to affect you over a period of time’. This change was to bring the HSE questions in line with harmonised disability questions for social surveys. The harmonised standards are designed to be consistent with a conceptual framework of disability, taking account of the needs of national and European administrations for data continuity and the definitions and guidelines contained in UK and EU legislation, including the Equality Act and the EUSILC (EU-Statistics on Income and Living Conditions) regulation.

A longstanding illness is defined as limiting if the participant reports that it reduces their ability to carry out day-to-day activities.

A p-value is the probability of the observed result occurring due to chance alone. A p-value of less than 5% is conventionally taken to indicate a statistically significant result (p<0.05). It should be noted that the p-value is dependent on the sample size, so that with large samples differences or associations which are very small may still be statistically significant. Results should therefore be assessed for their importance on the magnitude of the differences or associations as well as on the p-value itself.

A push-to-web survey design involves using offline contact methods (for example, by mail) to encourage participants to go online and complete a web questionnaire. Pure push-to-web surveys naturally are prone to some non-response issues, with the online requirement being a barrier to some. Therefore, ‘web-first’ surveys build on the push-to-web methodology by adopting a mixed mode approach, following-up non-responders with a second, off-line mode. This is most commonly a paper survey. 

Regions are based on the nine former Government Office Regions: North East, North West, Yorkshire and the Humber, East Midlands, West Midlands, East of England, London, South East and South West.

Unless explicitly stated otherwise, references to smoking and smokers refer to the smoking of tobacco cigarettes. Smokers are categorised as current smokers (who said they smoked cigarettes at all nowadays), ex-regular smokers (who don’t currently smoke, but have smoked at least one cigarette a day in the past) and never regular smokers (who don’t currently smoke, may have smoked in the past, but never smoked regularly).

The statistical significance of an estimate is based on the probability of its occurring due to chance alone. Within this report, estimates are assumed to be statistically significant if they have a p-value of less than 0.05 or less, that is a probability of occurring by chance below 5%. Statistical significance does not imply substantive importance; differences that are statistically significant are not necessarily meaningful or relevant.

See also P-value

Alcohol consumption is reported in terms of units of alcohol; one unit of alcohol is 10ml by volume of pure alcohol. Participants are asked about the alcoholic drinks they have had, and these are converted to units

These include, but are not limited to, e-cigarettes. The HSE defines a vaping device as ‘any product that you can use to inhale vapour rather like you would a cigarette. It includes ones that have a battery as well as ones that do not such as voke’. Types of vaping devices asked about in the HSE FS questionnaire include disposable electronic cigarettes (non-rechargeable), electronic cigarette kits refillable with pre-filled cartridges, electronic cigarette kits refillable with liquids, and modular systems, which by which the user combines separate devices, including batteries and atomizers.