The Reports Portal allows addressing of complex and sophisticated questions by partitioning and stratifying the NOCC data. A partition of the data represents a high-level categorisation, in which data are organised into a number of groups within which more meaningful questions of the data can be posed. They are sets of data that would not be meaningful if they were aggregated together. For example, different measures relate to different issues concerning the client and so have different sets of questions. It would not be meaningful to get a client’s average score across the different types of measures collected for them.

Also, some partitions are hierarchical. For example, the measures collected for children and adolescents are different to those collected for adults, and different again for those collected for older persons. Both ‘age group’ and ‘measure’ are partitions, but the measure partitions are different for each age group partition.

Stratifications are attributes that can be used to make a sub selection within a partition. The sub selections of stratifications can be aggregated, since all of the observations being retrieved are part of the same partition and are, therefore, part of the same data set. For example, “sex” is a commonly used stratification. It is possible to retrieve the number of observations in a partition for just males, or just females, or for a combination of both.