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How important is context in the measurement of deprivation?

Andy Jones, Amanda Burke

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Background

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  • The concept of rural areas being distinct and the need to map this has been long understood

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Background

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  • Similarly the recognition that commonly used deprivation indices don’t necessarily capture the distinct nature of rural disadvantage isn’t new.
  • The English index of multiple deprivation was the first to include an “Access to services” domain in an attempt to capture a component of rural disadvantage.

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This work

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  • We wanted to see if the English IMD could be modified to make it better at describing rural disadvantage
    • The index is very urban centric.
    • It’s also something of a ‘black box’ where it can be time consuming to understand how values are derived.
    • Our work recognises that elements of urban deprivation also apply to rural settings but that they might be lost in the rural context due to the way the index is generated.
    • We also considered if some elements of deprivation that didn’t appear in the IMD could be included

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Our aims

We wanted to produce a dataset but also a flexible framework for adaptation as required.

The aim wasn’t to “show” rural areas as deprived.

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What about the IMD?

Can we ‘reweight’ the IMD?

  • Two IMD domains* include measures relevant to rural deprivation. However, scores are combined with measures relevant to urban deprivation and then statistically transformed.
  • This means it is difficult to re-weight for rurality.
  • It also makes it hard to intuitively understand the actual weigh that rural measures contribute.

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*Barriers to Housing and Services and Living Environment

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Creating a framework

1. Relative household deprivation domain

2. Locality related deprivation domain

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Populating the domains�

(Using publicly available data)

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1. Relative deprivation domain

  • IMD Income domain
  • IMD Employment domain
  • IMD Education domain
  • IMD Health and disability domain

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2. Locality related deprivation domain

  • DoT Ave time to travel to 8 essential services
  • IMD: Housing in poor condition

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3. Population domain

  • ONS mid-year population estimates 75+

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IMD – LSOAs in Norfolk

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RDI – LSOAs in Norfolk

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In conclusion

What do you visualize when you think of ‘deprivation?’

How importance is context in that thought?

Frameworks such as the ‘Three Domains’ framework provides a theoretical basis for developing and/or weighting deprivation indices for different purposes and contexts.

This approach could easily be adapted for coastal areas. What measures might be important?

Our national RDI values can be accessed from the Strategic Health Asset Planning and Evaluation (SHAPE) atlas