You are in: Home › Statistics › Publications and Data › Weekly and Monthly Data on Births and Deaths Registered in Scotland › Weekly Data on Births and Deaths Registered in Scotland ›

Weekly Data on Births and Deaths Registered in Scotland 

8 September 2008

This page contains summary weekly data on births and deaths registered in Scotland. Our aim is to provide regular updates that will enable emerging trends to be monitored quickly.

Table 1 gives the total births and deaths registered in each of the latest four weeks together with totals from the start of the year, running 52 week totals and full calendar year totals for previous years.

Table 2 lists the weekly totals since the start of 2004.

Note: The tables below have been made available as "Excel, and Comma Separated Values (CSV)" spreadsheet files or can be viewed in Adobe Acrobat Portable Document Format (pdf). When opening the spreadsheet files your browser, depending on how it's been configured, will prompt to either open the file or save it to disk. Maximum file size is 59 Kb.

 Pdf files require Acrobat Reader. Download Acrobat Reader free.

Notes:

1. The information presented is based on the date of registration, not the date on which the event occurred. This is consistent with all routine data published by the General Register Office for Scotland (GROS) e.g. in the Registrar General’s Annual Reports. (Further information on date of registration versus date of occurrence is given below.)

2. The figures shown for 2007 and 2008 are provisional. All provisional data are shown in italics.

3. Initially, new weekly data will be added every 4 weeks.  More frequent updating may be considered in the future.

Date of registration versus date of occurrence

All routine vital events information we publish is based on the date of registration, not the date on which the event occurred. Inevitably, of course, there are delays between the occurrence of an event and its registration. From the information held on GROS databases it is possible to derive data relating to the actual date of the event. For detailed studies of short time periods we recommend that users consider using such data. For all enquiries on data availability please contact our Statistics Customer Services.

Time taken to register births and deaths

In Scotland there is a legal requirement to register births within 21 days and deaths within 8 days. The overwhelming majority of births and deaths are registered within these limits. The charts below show the number of days taken to register births and deaths in 2006. For births the mean interval was 11.7 days and the median interval was 11 days. For deaths the mean was 2.3 days and the median was 1 day.

Note: The charts below have been made available as "Excel" spreadsheet files or can be viewed in Adobe Acrobat Portable Document Format (pdf). When opening the spreadsheet files your browser, depending on how it's been configured, will prompt to either open the file or save it to disk. Maximum file size is 23 Kb.