Understanding Society User Support

Many thanks for your enquiry. The Understanding Society team is looking into it and we will get back to you as soon as we can. We aim to respond to simple queries within 48 hours and more complex issues within 7 working days.

Best wishes,
Understanding Society User Support Team

Dear Fiona,

You are right about the high number of -9 for MSOA11. We checked this and it seems that for MSOA11 for waves 1 to 4 ONSPD_MAY_2013 was used, ONSPD_MAY_2013 includes only England and Wales but not Scotland. Scotland is not included until ONSPD_MAY_2015. So all of those -9’s are due to Scotland MSOAs being missing from Waves 1 to 5. However, for LSOA11 for waves 1 to 6 ONSPD_MAY_2015 for waves 1 to 6 which therefore does included Scotland.

Thank you for highlighting the issue, we will try to address it in the November data release. In the meantime, you can try to derive the Scottish MSOAs from LSOAs using a look table, e.g. https://statistics.gov.scot/downloads/file?id=13360f3a-ca68-4f3e-8b7f-caffed8712eb%2FDataZone2011lookup_2022-05-31.csv (please not that the Scottish equivalents of LSOA and MSOA are, respectively, datazone and intermediate Zone).

Best wishes,
Piotr Marzec
UKHLS User Support