Occasional Paper

Combining the individual domain deprivation indices into a single multiple deprivation index needed a standardisation procedure. The procedure had to ensure that the most deprived wards were easily identified. Also it was required that each domain had a common distribution and did not conflate size with level of deprivation. The procedure that best meets the criteria is the exponential transformation.

Weighting is particularly important when creating an index of multiple deprivation as a sum of individual indices of deprivation. The obvious way is to sum each of the individual indices. However research shows that some aspects of deprivation are more important than others (Gordon et al, 2000 and Noble et al, 2000).

Thus the overall Scottish multiple index of deprivation is weighted as Formula 1.1.3 (10 Kb PDF file). 

 

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