Representative
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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?
OAs and SOAs
Posted by Simon Whalley (not verified) on 22/01/2007 - 15:56
The development of sensible geographical units which describe the area that they are trying to represent was one of the huge benefits of the 2001 Census from research pioneered by David Martin and Stan Openshaw. They allow the comparison of different areas knowing that the results you get are not biased by the areas having a big difference in the underlying population of the different areas.
Being at a finer scale has allowed much more detailed analysis to be carried out. I would argue that the principal of these geographical units should not be dropped for the next Census. They are a great idea and seeing that individual records can never be released, the best compromise available.
Changing the definition of Output Areas or Super Output Areas will annoy any researcher who wants to carry out time series analysis. However, areas do change over time, urban decline or new housing developments as a result of government planning. Where significant change has occurred, surely these areas should be re-computed so that at the next Census, the geographical units best describe the areas they are meant to represent. This will give researchers or anyone who is interested in using these data the idea that they can sensibly analyse these data.
Wards are a throw back to the dark ages when geographical units were created for ease of use rather than any idea of allowing sensible analysis to be carried out. Super Output Areas are far more sensible units to use instead and can be used as compariable units. The Index of Multiple Deprivation is created at this level. Other data sets like mid-year population estimates are now produced at this level. Government policy seems to be releasing data sets at this level at quite regular intervals (biannual). With wards consistently changing for non-geographical reasons these are all strong arguments for using Super Output Areas, and ignoring Wards.