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Scotland's People Volume 7: results from the 2001/2002 Scottish Household Survey

Appendix 1 - Glossary

Household members

For the purposes of the survey, a household is defined as one person or a group of people living in accommodation as their only or main residence and either sharing at least one meal a day or sharing the living accommodation.

The highest income householder (HIH) is taken as the household reference person for the interview. The respondent for the first part of the interview must be a person in whose name the accommodation is owned or rented or who is otherwise responsible for the accommodation.

In households with joint householders, the person with the highest income is taken as the household reference person. If householders have exactly the same income, the older is taken as the household reference person.

Adult is used to refer to those aged 16 and over (except where otherwise stated). Children are aged under 16 years.

In each household one of the eligible adult members of the household is randomly selected to take part in the second half of the interview. Eligible adults are adult household members who have not been living apart from the household continuously for the previous six months. This might include adults working away from home, in the Forces or in prison. This person is referred to as the random adult. The random adult is automatically the 'household respondent' in one-adult households and may be the same as the household respondent in households with more than one adult.

Household type

The SHS uses eight household types defined as follows:

A single adult household contains one adult of non-pensionable age and no children.

A single parent household contains one adult of any age and one or more children.

A single pensioner household contains one adult of pensionable age and no children. Pensionable age is 60 for women and 65 for men.

A small family household contains two adults of any age and one or two children.

An older smaller household contains one adult of non-pensionable age and one of pensionable age and no children, or two adults of pensionable age and no children.

A large adult household contains three or more adults and no children.

A small adult household contains two adults of non-pensionable age and no children.

A large family household contains two adults of any age and three or more children, or three or more adults of any age and one or more children.

Household income

The term annual net household income refers to income (i.e. after taxation and other deductions) from employment, benefits and other sources that is brought into the household by the highest income householder and/or their spouse or partner. This includes any contribution to household finances made by other household members (e.g. dig money).

The definition is not the same as that used by other Government surveys such as the Family Resources Survey. These measure the income of all household members. Income data from the SHS should not, therefore, be compared with other sources without careful consideration of the methods used in compiling the data.

While in general the level of missing data throughout the SHS is minimal, there is an appreciable level of item non-response in relation to income information. Incomplete data results in around one third of households having no computed total net income. Imputation of income information was carried out. This is a process whereby complete information given by 'similar' households is used for respondents that have missing income information. Income is collected as a variety of different components, such as income from employment, benefits and other sources, which are summed to create total net household income. Income was imputed for each component using either Hot Deck imputation, where the sample is divided into subgroups based on relevant characteristics, or Predictive Mean where a statistical model is constructed and the value is predicted using this model. After imputation, income data is unavailable for only around 3% of households.

Employment status

The household respondent is asked to select which of the following categories best describes the current position of each member of the household:

• Full-time employee
• Part-time employee
• Self-employed
• Permanently retired from work
• Unemployed and seeking work
• At school
• In further/higher education
• Government work or training scheme
• Permanently sick or disabled
• Unable to work because of short-term illness of injury
• Pre-school
• Looking after the home or family
• Other

The household working status is constructed from the economic status information about the highest income householder and, where applicable, his or her spouse/partner. Individuals are included as working where they work full- or part-time or if they are self-employed. Working age is 16-59 years old for women and 16-64 years for men.

Unemployment rates and average earnings

The SHS is not designed to provide reliable statistics such as unemployment rates and average earnings. The SHS has questions on these topics only for selecting the data of particular groups, such as unemployed or low paid people, for further analysis or for use as background variables when analysing other topics. Therefore, the SHS cannot be used as a source of unemployment rates or average earnings. Please see the 'Correspondence and enquiries' section on page 189 for details of Scottish Executive contacts who deal with unemployment rates and average earnings statistics.

Urban/rural classification

For the purposes of the SHS, a six-fold urban/rural classification of Scotland has been adopted, based on settlement size and remoteness (measured by drive times) to allow more detailed geographical analysis to be conducted on a larger sample size.

Using respondents' home postcodes, households have been classified as follows:

Large urban areas - households in the city conurbations of Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Dundee, and Glasgow (settlements 125,000 population and over).

Other urban areas - households in settlements of 10,000 to 124,999 people.

Accessible small towns - households in settlements of between 3,000 and 9,999 people and within 30 minutes drive of a settlement of 10,000 or more.

Remote small towns - small towns (between 3,000 and 9,999 people) with a drive time of more than 30 minutes of a settlement of 10,000 or more.

Accessible rural - households in settlements of less than 3,000 people and within 30 minutes drive of a settlement of 10,000 or more.

Remote rural - households in settlements of less than 3,000 people with a drive time of more than 30 minutes of a settlement of 10,000 or more.

Isolated houses and hamlets are included in settlements of less than 3,000 people.

Table I shows the percentage of households in each area type.

Table I - Urban/rural indicator

2001/2002 data, weighted

More information on the urban/rural indicator can be found in the survey technical report.

Bedroom standard

The bedroom standard is a measure of occupation density and is used to calculate the minimum number of bedrooms that might be expected to be required by the people resident in a dwelling, taking into account their ages and the nature of their relationships as far as possible. It then compares this number with the number of bedrooms available in the dwellings. The calculation of the number of bedrooms required is based on the assumption that a separate bedroom is required for:

• each cohabiting couple
• any other person aged 21 years or over
• each pair of young persons of the same sex aged 10-20 years, and
• each pair of children under 10 years (regardless of sex).

Unpaired young persons aged 10-20 are paired with a child under 10 of the same sex if possible or allocated a separate bedroom. Any remaining unpaired children under 10 are also allocated a separate bedroom.

Housing tenure

For most reporting purposes, housing tenure is broken down into six categories, namely:

• Households who own their property outright
• Households buying their property with a mortgage or loan (including paying part mortgage and part rent under a shared ownership arrangement)
• Households renting from a local authority or from Scottish Homes
• Households renting from a Housing Association or Co-operative
• Households renting from a private landlord or from a friend or relative of a household member
• Others including those living rent free, renting from an employer.

Some of these categories might be collapsed into:

• owner occupied, which includes households who own outright and those buying with a mortgage or loan.
• the public rented sector, which includes all households renting from a local authority or Scottish Homes
• the social rented sector, which includes households in the public rented sector and all households renting from a Housing Association or Co-operative.

Long-standing limiting illness, health problem or disability

The question "Do you or anyone else in the household have any long-standing illness, health problem or disability which limits your/their daily activity or the work you/they can do?" was asked of the household respondent about each member of the household to establish the prevalence of long-term illness within households. The respondent's own assessment of what constitutes a long-standing illness, health problem or disability was therefore used rather than a medical assessment of illness.

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