An assessment of the Nam Pehchan computer program for the identification of names of south Asian ethnic origin

Abstract

The Nam Pehchan program quickly identified a high proportion of the names classified as south Asian by the reference standard, but the high false positive rate means that the program alone is not an adequate single strategy. The time-consuming process of inspection of program negatives for large data sets can be substantially reduced by comparison with dictionaries of common non south Asian names.

Survival trends of cancer amongst the south Asian and non-south Asian population under 30 years of age in Yorkshire, UK

“…This increased mortality risk was seen for all cancers combined, leukaemia, CNS, and other solid tumours. Taken together with the increased risk of death associated with ethnicity, our results infer that south Asian patients aged [15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29] years with leukaemia would be four times more likely to die than non-south Asian children, under the assumption of multiplicative effects from the Cox regression modelling. Part of the explanation for lower survival rates seen in older children and young adults could be due either to differences in the biological or molecular characteristics of tumours occurring in this age group or the reported smaller proportion of older TYA patients (19% in 2006/2007) enrolled onto clinical trials than their childhood cancer counterparts (51% in 2006/2007) [32].…”

“…of Pakistani, Indian, or Bangladeshi origin) or non-south Asian (all other ethnicities) primarily via two name analysis programs (Nam Pehchan and SANGRA) and secondly through an independent validation with linked inpatient HES data [13,[15][16].…”

Deoxynivalenol exposure assessment in a cohort of pregnant women from Bradford, UK

“…If ethnicity data was missing this was derived from the participants first and last name using the Nam Pehchan naming algorithm written to identify names of South Asian origin (Cummins et al 1999;Macfarlane et al 2007). South Asian ethnicity was assigned where either self reported or indicated using the Nam Pechan algorithm.…”

Operationalising the collection of ethnicity data in studies of the sociology of health and illness

“…However, there are drawbacks to validated name analysis. When compared with a reference standard, a computer programme for the identification of names of South Asian origin was found to have a sensitivity of 90.5 per cent but a high false positive rate (36.8 per cent), making the programme alone not an adequate single identification strategy (Cummins et al 1999). For studies that require Census denominator data for the construction of rates, the method is unsatisfactory because of the differences in allocation methods.…”