Scotlands Census 2001 Statistics on Moving Households and Moving Groups

The Terms used in this Paper

5. The 2001 Census in Scotland, and the Censuses in England & Wales and Northern Ireland, asked people to provide details of their usual address one year earlier. Respondents could tick one of three boxes to indicate that they either:

Lived at the same address one year before Census day, or
Had no usual address one year before, or
Lived elsewhere one year before.

6. People who said they had lived elsewhere one year before were asked to write in this address. A migrant is someone who either had lived elsewhere or had no usual address one year before.

7. A moving group is a group of people (or an individual) who lived at one address at the time of the Census and who shared a different address a year before.

Moving households

8. A moving household is a household at Census time which contained at least one moving group. There are two types of moving household:

In a wholly moving household, members had moved from a common address during the year. For example, if a man, his wife and his two children were the only residents at address X at Census time and they had all lived at address Y one year earlier, they would form a wholly moving household. A wholly moving household consists of one (and only one) moving group, containing all residents of the household.
In a partly moving household, one or more members of the household had moved during the year, but not all members of the household had lived at a common address one year earlier. So, a partly moving household can be one of the following:
- All members of the household were migrants but not all of them lived at the same address one year before the Census. An example of this could be a flat in Dundee which had three residents on Census day and these residents had lived one year earlier, in Edinburgh, London and Cardiff. This partly moving household would consist of three separate moving groups, each of one person.
- Some, but not all, of the residents were migrants. Suppose, for example, that a man and his wife moved in with the man’s parents in the year prior to the Census, with the parents not having moved address over the same period. The four person household at the time of the Census would also be a partly moving household but would contain only one moving group, of two people (the man and his wife).
A partly moving household can consist of any number of moving groups, though no moving group can contain every member of the household.

9. The terms wholly moving household and partly moving household refer to the household at Census time, not one year before. For example, a household with four people in it at the time of the Census, where all four people had moved from a common address one year earlier, would be a wholly moving household, regardless of whether there had been anyone else also living at the previous address one year before. In addition, a man who moved in with someone who had not moved in the previous year would be part of a partly moving household even if he had been the only resident at his previous address.

10. The diagram in the later section entitled "Types of moving households" gives a pictorial illustration of how wholly moving households and partly moving households are defined.

Household reference persons and moving group reference persons

11. The household population is everyone in the population living in private households (i.e. excluding people living in communal establishments such as nursing homes, prisons and student halls of residence). A person in a household can be some, all or none of a family reference person, household reference person or moving group reference person.

12. In a lone parent family, the family reference person (FRP) is taken to be the lone parent. In a couple family, the FRP is chosen from the two people in the couple on the basis of their economic activity (in the priority order : full-time job, part-time job, unemployed, retired, other). If both people have the same economic activity, the FRP is identified as the elder of the two or, if they are the same age, the first member of the couple on the Census form.

13. For a person living alone, that person is clearly the household reference person (HRP). If the household contains only one family, the HRP is the same as the FRP. If there is more than one family in the household, the HRP is chosen from among the FRPs using the same criteria as for choosing the FRP (economic activity, then age, then order on the Census form).

14. Someone who is either or both an FRP and/or an HRP, may or may not be a moving group reference person (MGRP).

15. If there is only one person in a moving group, that person is automatically the MGRP. If a moving group contains the household reference person (HRP), again the HRP is automatically the MGRP. If a moving group does not contain the HRP, the MGRP is chosen from among any FRPs in the moving group using the same criteria as for choosing the FRP (economic activity, then age, then order on the Census form). If there are no FRPs in the moving group, the MGRP is chosen from among any people who are in the group and who are not a child of the family they live in, using the same criteria as for choosing the FRP. If there is no person in the moving group who is not a child of the family they live in, the MGRP is chosen from all the people in the moving group using the same criteria as for choosing the FRP.

16. In a wholly moving household, the HRP is automatically the (one and only) MGRP. In a partly moving household, a person who is the FRP and/or the HRP may not themselves be a migrant and clearly a non-migrant cannot be an MGRP. However, an HRP in a partly moving household who is a migrant has to be an MGRP.

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