[2] The origins of geodemographics are often identified as Charles Booth and his studies of deprivation and poverty in early twentieth century London, and the Chicago School of sociology.
Booth developed the idea of 'classifying neighborhoods', exemplified by his multivariate classification of the 1891 UK Census data to create a generalized social index of London's (then) registration districts.
Of particular importance to the emerging geodemographic industry was the development of clustering techniques to group statistically similar neighborhoods into classes on a 'like with like' basis.
More recently, data has become available at finer geographical resolutions (such as postal units), often originating from private commercial (i.e. non-governmental) sources.
Similar classifications had been developed for earlier censuses, notably by Stan Openshaw and colleagues at Newcastle and Leeds Universities, but access to these generally was restricted to the academic communities.
[4] In Australia, general purpose geodemographic systems summarises a broad range of profiling data, largely derived from the Australian Census to create a thumbnail sketch of the type of people living in a particular small area.
The generally unknown variance within geodemographic groupings makes it difficult to assess the significance of trends found in data.