Appendix 1 - Glossary
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.
Socio-Economic Classification ( NS- SEC)
National Statistics Socio-economic Classification ( NS- SEC) is an occupationally based classification which, in line with all official statistics and surveys, has been introduced to the SHS to replace the use of Socio-Economic Groups ( SEG). The eight-fold analytic version of NS- SEC has been used.
Respondent's occupation and details of their employment status (whether an employer, self-employed or employee; whether a supervisor; number of employees at the workplace) have been used to create the following classifications:
- Higher managerial and professional occupations
- Lower managerial and professional occupations
- Intermediate occupations
- Small employers and own account workers
- Lower supervisory and technical occupations
- Semi-routine occupations
- Routine occupations
- Never worked and long-term unemployed.
More information on the definition of NS- SEC can be found at www.statistics.gov.uk/methods_quality/ns_sec.
Unemployment rates and average earnings
The SHS is not designed to provide reliable statistics on 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. The SHS's information about the economic status of members of the household reflects the view of the respondent to the "household" part of the interview, and so may not conform to official definitions of employment and unemployment, for example. As a result, the SHS cannot provide estimates of unemployment that are comparable to official statistics of unemployment 12. Therefore, the SHS cannot be used as a source of unemployment rates or average earnings. Please see the 'Correspondence and enquiries' section on page 180 for details of Scottish Executive contacts who deal with unemployment rates and average earnings statistics.
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 net annual 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. 13
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. Please contact the SHS project manager if you would like further information on the imputation process.
Urban/rural classification
The Scottish Executive six-fold urban/rural classification of Scotland has been adopted. This classification is based on settlement size and remoteness (measured by drive times) allowing more detailed geographical analysis to be conducted on a larger sample size. The classification being used in this report is the latest version.
The areas in which respondents live have been classified as follows:
Large urban areas - settlements of over 125,000 people.
Other urban areas - settlements of 10,000 to 125,000 people.
Accessible small towns - settlements of between 3,000 and 10,000 people and within 30 minutes drive of a settlement of 10,000 or more.
Remote small towns - settlements of between 3,000 and 10,000 people and with a drive time of over 30 minutes to a settlement of 10,000 or more.
Accessible rural - settlements of less than 3,000 people and within 30 minutes drive of a settlement of 10,000 or more.
Remote rural - settlements of less than 3,000 people with a drive time of more than 30 minutes to a settlement of 10,000 or more.
Isolated houses and hamlets are included in settlements of fewer than 3,000 people.
Table A1.1 shows the percentage of households in each area type. (See page 178 for a map detailing the area types across Scotland).
Table A1.1 - Number of households by Scottish Executive urban/rural classification
2003/2004 data
| Unweighted Frequency | Weighted Frequency | Weighted Percent |
|---|
Large urban areas | 11,265 | 12,517 | 40.6 |
|---|
Other urban areas | 8,622 | 8,730 | 28.3 |
|---|
Accessible small towns | 3,196 | 3,163 | 10.3 |
|---|
Remote small towns | 1,379 | 905 | 2.9 |
|---|
Accessible rural | 3,744 | 3,801 | 12.3 |
|---|
Remote rural | 2,613 | 1,704 | 5.5 |
|---|
Grand total | 30,819 | 30,819 | 100.0 |
|---|
More information on the urban/rural classification can be found in Scottish Household Survey: Fieldwork Outcomes 2003/2004.
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 "Could I just check, do you have any long-standing illness, health problem or disability that limits your daily activities or the kind of work you can do? By disability as opposed to ill-health, I mean a physical or mental impairment, which has a substantial and long-term adverse effect on your ability to carry out normal day-to-day activities." was asked of the random adult respondent to establish the prevalence of long-term illness among the adult population 14. The respondent's own assessment of what constitutes a long-standing illness, health problem or disability was used rather than a medical assessment of illness.
It should be noted that that this data is not directly comparable to reports relating to the period 1999-2002. During this period, the SHS Annual Reports used data from the household respondent about each household member. From 2003, we have reported on the survey results from the additional question asked to the random adult directly.