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Art is a leveller - education, age, money, gender, faith are irrelevant - shared tastes and appreciation of art transcend these divisions.

The Arts Debate, Arts Council England 2007

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Age group or age categories

What does this mean?

An approach that uses ranges based on ‘years of age’ to subdivide the wider population into bands.

The specific age groups used will depend on any other data the analysis is to be compared with. However, use of the appropriate age bands, combined with the ingenious use of aggregation, potentially makes comparison with larger data sets possible. The table below shows the age bands used for the Target Group Index [TGI] data, together with those used by the Office for National Statistics to summarise National Census data.(Guidance on how to ask about and create age groups is provided in the relevant protocols section below).

Target Group Index National Statistics
Under 15 0 to 4
5 to 9
10 to 14
15 to 24 15 to 19
20 to 24
25 to 44 25 to 29
30 to 34
35 to 39
40 to 44
45 to 64 45 to 49
50 to 54
55 to 59
60 to 64
65 and upwards 65 to 69
70 to 74
75 to 79
80 to 84
85 to 89
90 and over
How did we get this definition?

And among the many ways available of splitting up markets is to do it according to demographics. That is, by a customer’s, user’s or visitor’s age and life-stage. As a result, recording someone’s age becomes a key requirement for analysis and for marketing activity.

You might want to set your audience data in a wider context. Or maybe you want to collect and build data in a form that allows it to be married up with other similar data. Whatever your intention here, when it comes to demographics, both these reasons imply taking a consistent approach to classifying ages.

However, some of the available large-scale and aggregate data sets (such as the Target Group Index [TGI] data used by Arts Council England and the National Census data provided by the Office for National Statistics) use slightly different age ranges as their basis.

So before devising a survey or conducting an age classification of your audience, it would be as well to know which data set you want to compare your data with, and use the same set of age ranges accordingly. (A table showing the various age ranges used for TGI and the ONS National Census data is provided in the definitions section above).

Related and similar definitions

Clearly this is a case where it can be useful – if not vital – to ensure that the categories used fit with the most precise bands used elsewhere. Then, if more wide-ranging age categories are desired for simpler reporting purposes, they can be combined to form a larger category.

For instance, if you are particularly interested in ‘middle-aged people’, by using the age bands 40 to 44 years old, 45 to 49 years old, 50 to 54 years old and 55 to 59 years old, these can then be combined to give information for everyone aged between 40 and 59 years of age.

Understandably broad terms such as ‘young people’, ‘middle-aged people’ and ‘elderly people’ can have different meanings for different organisations. Hence the recommended approach to dealing with this is to first determine how your organisation interprets such terms, and then decide which age ranges each term is to cover. When such an understanding has been specifically created for an organisation’s use, its particular definition should be spelled out at an early stage.

When to use

Defined age ranges are of use for exercises such as audience andvistor surveys, analysis of catchment population profiles, and analysisof an organisation’s attender base.