CTV News is working with Environics Analytics in its election-night coverage with a new digital tool that gives a look into lifestyle demographics of residential neighbourhoods across Canada – which may provide insight into 2015 voting patterns.
PRIZM5, created by data analytics company Environics Analytics, allows users to type in their postal code – and in return, describes the current demographics, lifestyle, consumer behaviour, and mindset of consumers in that area.
The anonymized data, updated annually, is collected through a range of public data sources and satellite imagery.
Based on estimates from about 18,000 variables, Environics Analytics has determined 68 lifestyle types – such as ‘Asian New Wave’ and ‘Rustic Roads’ – and has broken them down into categories including occupation, housing tenure, social values, and education.
What follows is a description of the lifestyle type, which identifies everything from where people grab their coffee, to where they spend their weekends.
Rupen Seoni, vice president and practice leader of Environics Analytics, said this information can even help Canadians determine how people in their neighbourhood are likely to vote.
“Our ability to identify postal codes that are similar to one another across a riding or across the country allows us to cross-reference poll-level voting patterns and summarize those results by the PRIZM lifestyle types,” Seoni said.
“So we can take a PRIZM segment's vote distribution across the various political parties to help understand which segments of the population are more or less loyal to a particular party and who those voters are. “
While not everyone in any given neighbourhood has the same lifestyle habits, Seoni said the lifestyle types “describe the dominant characteristics of the population, recognizing that not everyone is exactly the same.”
CTV’s Kevin Newman will be working with Environics Analytics tools Monday night, and when ridings change hands, he’ll provide viewers with a closer look at who lives in that riding – and the issues typically on voters’ minds.
The Environics Analytics tool is available to the public at this link. You can enter your postal code to receive an overview of the type of people who live in your neighbourhood.
