Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation: 2009 General Report

Annex E: Population changes

When datazones were created, one of the aims was that they had similar population with a mean of 750 and an ideal range of between 500 and 1,000 people in each. Even when created not all fell within this range because of the other factors used in the creation of zones, existing boundaries, social homogeneity and compactness of shape. Since the creation of datazones the populations in some have increased and some decreased due to demolition and new build The datazone boundaries have not changed as the purpose of them is to provide a fixed area over time.

The change in populations within datazones will also affect the proportion of individuals in each vigintile, decile or quintile of the SIMD. The table below shows the population by Vigintile for each of the SIMD updates. The vigintile populations ranged from 4.75% to 5.20% in SIMD 2004, reduced slightly in SIMD 2006 to 4.84% and 5.17% and have increased again in SIMD 2009 to 4.77% and 5.30%. As the purpose of the SIMD is to identify deprived areas the variation in populations does not have a large impact on the results as all the domains use datazone populations as the denominator in the calculations. Datazone populations could be an issue when using the SIMD to allocate funding for example. In this case the advice is to population weight the funding ie work out how many people live in the deprived areas of interest then allocate on a per head basis.

Population by vigintile for SIMD 2004, 2006 and 2009