Representative
About
The ONS is keen to establish a long term, small area geography policy which will be used for Census 2011 and Neighbourhood Statistics. The aim is to support the production of coherent and useful data that can be used with confidence by all organisations.
The consultation paper is available online. This describes all policy proposals, the background to them, and a number of attendant issues. Please take the time to get involved by responding to the survey and joining in the debate around the blog posts.
Latest Posts
- The consultation has now closed .........
- Consultation period ends this Friday (16th Feb)
- Do you use Output Areas?
- Don't forget the surveys
- How important are postcodes?
- Should boundaries be tied to the real world?
- Festive messages
- Health data? Ethnicity data? Do we need bigger areas?
- Consultation document
- OAs and SOAs - Stick or Twist?
Creating SOAs
Posted by Nick Stripe on 29/11/2006 - 14:59
MSOAs are groups of LSOAs constrained to local authority boundaries. As with OAs and LSOAs they were initially created by an iterative zoning algorithm which took into account measures of population size (and the number of households), mutual proximity, and housing homogeneity (in terms of tenure and type). Factors relating to housing homogeneity were less influential at the MSOA scale. Population size was the dominant design criteria.
Unlike OAs and LSOAs there was a second stage to the creation of MSOAs: local authorities and their partners were invited to propose changes to the original constitutions to potentially enable the creation of areas that better met local needs. This led to a slightly looser population distribution across the country than the automated solution had resulted in, although all MSOAs had a population greater than 5,000 and the most were less than 10,000. The mean size was 7,200.