Canadian Social Environment Typology: A New Geographic Classification Tool to Classify Canadian Neighbourhoods

The Canadian Social Environment Typology (CanSET) is a geographic classification tool to compare neighbourhoods across Canadian Census Metropolitan Areas and Census Agglomerations. The CanSET was developed by the Centre for Population Health Data (CPHD) at Statistics Canada. It provides three levels of neighbourhood classifications based on combinations of 30 socioeconomic, demographic and ethnocultural variables from the Census of population 2016. Each social environment cluster is a group of similar dissemination areas and represents a unique neighbourhood type. The CanSET data comes with definitions of each neighbourhood type so that users can compare health and social outcomes by neighbourhood characteristics. The CanSet classification includes the data, user guide and methodology guide.