Details of August 2009 Improvements to Vital Events Statistics
August 2009 improvements to the statistical information available on the GROS web site about births, marriages, civil partnerships, divorces, dissolutions and deaths
This note describes the main improvements, made in August 2009, to the statistical information about "vital events" (births, marriages, civil partnerships, divorces, dissolutions and deaths) which is available on the General Register Office for Scotland (GROS) web site (and also on the Scottish Neighbourhood Statistics web site). It does not mention a number of "minor" improvements.
Vital Events Reference Tables
Several new tables have been added:
- Table 3.14 - live births, stillbirths and maternities, each cross-classified by the sex of child, the marital status of the parents and the age of mother. Figures are provided for Scotland, for each local authority and for each NHS board area - so it is a very large table.
- Table 3.15 - live births, cross-classified by the ages of the mother and the father (if known). It also provides the average age of the father for each age of the mother, and vice versa.
- Table 6.14 - average age at death from "main" causes
- Table 9.1 - civil partnerships by sex and year
- Table 9.2 - civil partnerships cross-classified by sex and the ages of the partners
- Table 9.3 - dissolutions of civil partnerships by sex and year.
The following tables have been expanded markedly:
- Table 3.2 - extended back to 1974 (previously, 1995 was the first year for which figures were provided)
- Table 3.6 - columns for 1951 and 1964 have been added, along with a row giving the average ages of mothers
- Table 3.7 - a new "part b" gives the cumulative fertility, at each year of age, of the female birth cohorts for 1951, 1956, 1961, 1966, 1971 and 1976
- Table 4.1 - extended to give figures for each individual year back to 1971 (previously, figures for individual years were provided only for 2001 onwards)
- Table 4.2 - extended to give figures for each individual year back to 1971 (previously, figures for individual years were provided only for 2001 onwards)
- Table 6.5 - expanded to provide the numbers for each of the causes of death shown (previously, it provided only percentage breakdowns by cause of death)
- Table 7.4 - extended to give figures for each individual year back to 1971 (previously, figures for individual years were provided only for 1995 onwards)
- Table 7.6 - extended to give figures for each individual year back to 1961 (previously, figures for individual years were provided only for 1995 onwards)
In addition, some "smaller" improvements have been made to other tables.
Time-series Tables
Several new tables have been added:
- Births by mother's age (individual years of age, from 12 to 56, with subtotals) - 1945 onwards
- Births by month of registration - 1954 onwards
- Deaths by sex and single year of age - 1974 onwards
- Deaths by sex and age-group - 1901 onwards
Other material on the Web site
The section on clostridium difficile deaths has been expanded by including quarterly figures in the summary table, and by adding two new tables which show the numbers of deaths for which it was a contributory factor to (but not the underlying cause of) the death, broken down by (a) the NHS board of the person's usual residence and (b) the hospital in which the person died.
The section on MRSA deaths has been expanded by including quarterly figures in the summary table.
New pages have been added to provide information about:
- sources of information for coding the causes of death
- how GROS classifies deaths for statistical purposes as (probable) suicides
- the revision of the historical series of Divorce figures
New Neighbourhood Statistics figures
Finally, GROS has added to the Scottish Neighbourhood Statistics website, the numbers of births and death in each data zone for
(a) calendar years, by date of registration
(b) mid-year to mid-year periods (1 July to 30 June) by date of occurrence
for the following years:
(a) 2001 onwards
(b) mid-2001 to mid-2002 onwards – with the date being shown against the second of the years in the period. For example, the data for mid-2007 to mid-2008 is shown as ‘2008’.
These figures are available in the advanced reporter, for example, by selecting ‘Data Zone’ as the area type, ‘population’ main topic, ‘Births and Deaths’ sub topic, then ‘Births’ or ‘Deaths’.
