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?
Time Series analysis
Posted by Steven Ward (not verified) on 09/02/2007 - 14:54
So most geographies change over time, but most people want to analyse data over time.
The need to analyse areas (small or otherwise) over time is for me driven by the continuing geographical inequalities that exist between areas and the desire of governments (at whatever level) to try and reduce these inequalities.
ONS, as a government body, surely needs to produce outputs that can effectively measure the effect of government policies.
I take on board the comments re population changes over time (ie that you are never measuring the same people), but this applies at every level, right up to a global level - the people on the planet today aren't the same as they were yesterday.
Maybe what we need is a consistent small area geography, from which other geographies can be built and changed as necessary ... maybe we could call them output areas?