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Measuring Deprivation in Scotland: Developing a Long-Term Strategy: Final Report
8. Conclusions
An increasing number of terms are used to refer to social needs - poverty, deprivation, social exclusion or inclusion, or social justice, for example. To some extent these terms may be used interchangeably but they can also be used to signal important differences in focus. We do not argue that deprivation is in some way a better concept of social need than others but we do believe that it is important for its focus on the poor material and social living standards which people face as a result of poverty. In discussing how to measure deprivation, we have tried to keep to these core issues. We also believe that measures of deprivation can provide important insights into a broader range of problems of exclusion or injustice and that they will be valuable in that respect as well.
The key recommendation emerging from this work is that the Executive should begin to develop a measure of deprivation at the individual level in addition to the area-based measures. There was a very high degree of support for this development. The individual approach would provide an absolute measure of levels of deprivation and would enable comparisons to be made between different groups. The real added value from developing both measures, however, lies in analyses which make comparisons between individual, group and area deprivation, exploring the extent to which different deprived groups are more or less concentrated into particular locations.
While most measures of deprivation claim some basis in the work of Townsend, some follow his framework more closely than others. Many area-based deprivation indices have moved away from a narrow focus on living standards to encompass a wider range of problems associated with concentrations of deprivation or seen as related problems which policy should address. Insisting that the area based measure had a narrower focus on living standards would have brought it into line with the proposed individual measure and this would have improved comparability between the two. It would have made it less useful for policy makers and practitioners in many areas and so we have recommended retaining this broader focus in the area index. Comparisons between individual and area measures should therefore be made with some caution.
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