Deprivation index
They were developed as part of the Lisbon Strategy, of the previous year, which envisioned the coordination of European social policies at country level based on a set of common goals.
IMDs may be an improvement over simpler measures of deprivation such as low average household disposable income because they capture variables such as the advantage of access to a good school and the disadvantage of exposure to high levels of air pollution.
For instance, standardised mortality rates, which show a deprivation gradient, contribute to the health domain of the Scottish IMD.
This is a particularly large risk in areas which are very diverse due to social housing and mixed community policies such as central London.
In these settings, a mixed community with a mix of very low income families in poor health and very high income families in good health can return a middling IMD score that represents neither group well and fails to provide useful insight to users of analysis based on IMD data.
Other groups not well represented by IMDs are mobile communities and people experiencing homelessness, some of the most deprived members of society.
Early version of English IMDs were produced by the Social Disadvantage Research Group at the University of Oxford.
[14][15][16][17][18][19] The SIMD 2020 is composed of 43 indicators grouped into seven domains of varying weight: income, employment, health, education, skills and training, housing, geographic access and crime.
[20] These seven domains are calculated and weighted for 6,976 small areas, called ‘data zones’, with roughly equal population.
[23][24] The score is an outcome of the need identified in the Acheson Committee Report (into General Practitioner (GP) services in the UK) to create an index to identify 'underprivileged areas' where there were high numbers of patients and hence pressure on general practitioner services.
This was then used to obtain statistical weights for a calculation of a composite index of underprivileged areas based on GPs' perceptions of workload and patient need.
[30] The work focuses on Scotland, and was an alternative to the Townsend Index to avoid the use of households as denominators.
Carstairs indices are calculated at the postcode sector level, with average population sizes of approximately 5,000 persons.
The Carstairs index makes use of data collected at the Census to calculate the relative deprivation of an area, therefore there have been four versions: 1981, 1991, 2001 and 2011.
The Carstairs indices are routinely produced and published[32] by the MRC/CSO Social and Public Health Sciences Unit at the University of Glasgow.
[citation needed] The indices are typically ordered from lowest to highest, and grouped into population quintiles.
This meant that the definition of low social class had to be amended to reflect the approximate operational categories.
[35] The definition of overcrowding was amended between 1981 and 1991, due to the inclusion of kitchens of at least 2 metres wide into the room count in the census.
[citation needed] Deprivation across the 8414 wards in the country was assessed, using the criteria of income, employment, health, education, housing, access, and child poverty.
[37] IMD2000 was the subject of some controversy,[citation needed] and was succeeded by the Indices of Deprivation 2004 (ID 2004) which abandoned ward-level data and sampled much smaller geographical areas.
The ID 2004 is based on the idea of distinct dimensions of deprivation which can be recognised and measured separately.
Earlier proposals to introduce Upper Layer Super Output Areas were dropped due to lack of demand.
The ID 2007 is based on the idea of distinct dimensions of deprivation which can be recognised and measured separately.
The Index is made up of seven distinct dimensions of deprivation called Domain Indices, which are: income; employment; health and disability, education, skills, and training; barriers to housing and services; living environment; and crime.
Like the ID2004, the ID2007 are measured at Lower Layer Super Output Areas and have similar strengths and weakness regarding concentrated pockets of deprivation.
The local authorities with the highest proportion of lower layer Super Output Areas (LSOAs) were in Liverpool, Middlesbrough, Manchester, Knowsley, the City of Kingston upon Hull, Hackney and Tower Hamlets.
[44] It has seven domains of deprivation: income, employment, education, health, crime, barriers to housing and services, and living environment.
For example the Barriers to Housing and Services considers seven components including levels of household overcrowding, homelessness, housing affordability, and the distance by road to four types of key amenity (post office, primary school, supermarket, and GP surgery).
