Analysing changes in lone parenthood across the City of Edinburgh using a consistent geography for the period 1981 – 2011

Abstract

This paper will describe and explore the local changes in lone parenthood across the city of Edinburgh for the time period 1981 – 2011. In order to do this, the relationship between lone parenthood, unemployment and non-home ownership are studied at detail, using census variables for four different time-periods. Since census areas are bound to time-specific geographies (e.g. boundaries and area naming change over time), variables from past censuses have been updated to contemporary and consistent geographies. This approach converts and re-aggregates census data to two different geographies: 2011 datazones (DZ) and 2011 detailed characteristics (DC), applying an interpolation method developed by Paul Norman, Phillip Rees and Paul Boyle called Geography Conversion Tables (CGT).

The paper concludes that the geography of lone parenthood in the study area is static: areas with high rates of lone parenthood are less prone to change than other areas and correspond to high rates of unemployment and social or rented housing. Additionally, areas with persistently high percentage of lone parenthood are associated with population decrease and unemployment.