Ethnicity

Best practice for providing ethnicity data to the national collections

This is a general guide when recording ethnicity for NHI and national collections reporting – individual collections may define specific rules

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Reporting ethnicity to the national collections

Field	Rules
Ethnicity_1	Mandatory (must be populated) Can be ‘Not stated’ (code 99) if ethnicity_2 and ethnicity_3 are both null
Ethnicity_2	Optional Can only be populated if Ethnicity_1 is populated Cannot be the same value as Ethnicity_1 Cannot be populated with ‘not stated (code 99)’
Ethnicity_3	Optional Can only be populated if Ethnicity_2 is populated Cannot be the same value as Ethnicity_2 or Ethnicity_1 Cannot be populated with not stated (code 99)

Guidelines

Not specified’ maps to null ethnicity. ‘Not specified’ should be used when the respondent provides fewer than three responses to the ethnicity question.
‘Not stated’ means that the respondent did not want to have their ethnicity recorded or the respondent was not in a position to report their ethnicity (eg unconscious).

Valid combinations

Number of ethnicity codes reported	Ethnicity_1	Ethnicity_2	Ethnicity_3
3 valid codes	11	21	30
2 valid codes	11	21	Null
1 valid code	11	Null	Null
1 valid code	99	Null	Null

Invalid combinations

Number of ethnicity codes reported	Ethnicity_1	Ethnicity_2	Ethnicity_3	Comment
3 codes	99	21	10	Cannot have 99 as ethnicity_1 when there are valid codes in ethnicity_2 or ethnicity_3
3 codes	21	11	11	Entry in Ethnicity_3 not required, it is the same as the code in Ethnicity_2
3 codes	21	11	11	Entry in Ethnicity_3 not required, it is the same as the code in Ethnicity_1
2 codes	54	99		Cannot have 99 as an ethnicity_2. Report null in this field
2 codes	21	11	99	Cannot have 99 as an ethnicity_3. Report null in this field
2 codes	Null	21	10	Ethnicity_1 should be populated first, then Ethnicity_2
2 codes	21	Null	11	Ethnicity_2 should be populated, not Ethnicity_3
1 code	Null	21		Ethnicity_1 should be populated first
1 code	Null			Ethnicity_1 is mandatory. Use ‘not stated’ (code 99) if no ethnicity is reported