smk_life_history: Ages of smoking initiation, quit and censoring
In dosgillespie/hseclean: Health Survey Data Wrangling

Description Usage Arguments Details Value Examples

Clean the ages that define when smokers started and stopped as recorded in the Health Survey for England data.

1	smk_life_history(data)

data

Data table - the Health Survey for England dataset.

For each individual smoker, the data recorded in the Health Survey for England implies a single age at which a smoker started to smoke and, if they stopped, an age at which they did so. This provides a simplified view of what might be a complicated life history of smoking, e.g. smoking to different frequencies or levels, or starting and stopping multiple times.

Both the start age and stop age will have error in them e.g. due to uncertainty in respondent recall, and, for years 2015+, due to the reporting in categories of time intervals rather than single years, which we then impute introducing random error.

Start age is likely to be biased towards earlier ages, because for adults with missing values we use the age first tried a cigarette, and for children the variable for start age does not necessarily mean the start of regular smoking, it is just the age at which they started to smoke.

We also create a variable for the age at which an individual was censored from our data sample - this is their age at the survey + 1 year.

Any missing data is assigned the average start or stop age for each age, sex and IMD quintile.

smk_start_age
smk_stop_age
censor_age

## Not run: 

data <- read_2001()
data <- clean_age(data)
data <- clean_demographic(data)
data <- smk_status(data)
data <- smk_former(data)
data <- smk_life_history(data)


## End(Not run)