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?
A stable geography?
Posted by Analyst (not verified) on 28/11/2006 - 08:27
A stable geography supports analysis over time which is a good thing. However the super output areas do not always match the areas we wish to analyse and that can cause a problem so should there be a redraw?
I think there are two points to consider
(1) If SOAs were redrawn now to reflect local communities how long would it be before there were calls to redraw again because communities had changed?
(2) If it were possible to produce statistics for specific communities from SOAs would people be more inclined to forget to take into account other factor such as year on year variability and changes to the underlying population when making comparisons?
I think the current boundaries should be kept - what may be needed is more help and guidance for people who are unfamiliar with them and so still want figures for administrative areas such as wards.
I look forward to seeing what other people think.