Swiss Neighbourhood Index of Socioeconomic Position (Swiss-SEP)

Swiss Neighbourhood Index of Socioeconomic Position (Swiss-SEP) is an area-based measure of socioeconomic position (SEP) for Switzerland. This is the third version of the index, based on the original work by Panczak et al. 2012 (DOI: 10.1136/jech-2011-200699). The index describes 1.54 million neighbourhoods of approximately 50 closest households and centred on residential buildings. Each building is located in space using geographical coordinates. Neighbourhoods are characterised by four domains: income (approximated by median rent per square metre), education (proportion of households with a person with primary education or less), employment (proportion of households with person working in unskilled occupations) and housing conditions ( crowding - the mean number of persons per room). Domains are combined using principal component analysis to form a score standardised to a range of 0 (lowest SEP) to 100 (highest SEP) and divided into quantiles. Three versions of index are available: 1 ('old', based on 2012 version, based on Census 2000), 2 ('new' version based on combined micro censuses 2012-2015) and 3 ('hybrid' combining version 1 and 2, updating values only for buildings constructed after 2000). Dataset is available free of charge for research purposes. Access to the dataset is possible after signing a contract with the Swiss National Cohort.