Friday 8 April 2011

The Domains of the IMD

What most people look at when they see the Indices of Deprivation is the combined Index of Deprivation score and rank for each area. I do this too, but it's always interesting to examine the individual domains to see how areas rank and what the spatial patterns look like. So, time for a map on all of this... (click to enlarge)



In the above image, you'll see that I've produced a raster map for each of the different domains of the English IMD 2010 and that each is sized according to the percentage weighting it gets in the final IMD. There are some interesting differences between domains which, by the way, are covered in Chapter 3 of the technical report.

Income and employment account for nearly half of the weighting for the final IMD score so these maps look pretty similar to the overall IMD map but there are interesting differences with other domains, in particular Barriers to Housing and Services. This picks up a lot of rural areas but also many in London and some other urban locations. Health deprivation and disability also differs from the final IMD map with a more obvious north-south / coalfield pattern. Finally, the most deprived LSOA on each domain is as follows...
  • Income: E01005482 in the Central and Falinge ward of Rochdale
  • Employment: E01005482 in the Central and Falinge ward of Rochdale
  • Health and Disability: E01005482 in the Central and Falinge ward of Rochdale
  • Education, Skills and Training: E01013640 in the Braunstone Park ward of Leicester
  • Barriers to Housing and Services: E01000604 in the Stonebridge ward of Brent
  • Crime: E01005454 in the Waterhead ward of Oldham
  • Living Environment: E01001780 in the Hoxton ward of Hackney
The fact that these domains are in different spreadsheets makes mapping it all a bit more time-consuming but since I combined them all anyway I decided to create raster versions just to provide a more fluid overview of the patterns across England. I'm sure I'll keep milking this data for a while!