Carstairs deprivation scores were used to measure relative deprivation differences between small areas and over time, as the scores are widely used and recognised (Carstairs and Morris 1989; Carstairs and Morris 1991). The Consistent Areas Through Time (CATTs, Exeter, Boyle et al. 2005) were used to provide a consistent geography between the 1981, 1991 and 2001 censuses, for ease of comparison. Specifically the CATT2 small area geography was use, giving 10,058 individual areas with an average population in 2001 of approximately 500 persons. Carstairs deprivation scores were unavailable for the CATT2 geography, therefore were calculated from raw census data. This also enabled a second set of scores to be calculated without the car ownership component (called Adjusted Carstairs hereafter), as car ownership is more of a necessity in rural areas compared with urban areas and can bias deprivation scores (Christie and Fonea 2003). Although unadjusted Carstairs scores have been used for national studies this was considered a useful opportunity to investigate how the car ownership component affected scores in rural areas. The Carstairs score is constructed from four components that have been shown to measure deprivation well (Carstairs and Morris 1989): 1. Overcrowding: the percentage of all persons living in private households with a density of more than one person per room. 2. Male Unemployment: the percentage of economically active males seeking or waiting to start work 3. Low Social Class: the percentage of all persons in private households with an economically active head with head of household in social class IV or V. 4. No Car: the percentage of all persons in private households which do not own a car.Richardson_07_Carstairs_score_construction.pdf - methodology description. Richardson_CarstairsByCATT2_1981_1991_2001v2.xls - data file. GROS_2001_data.xls - data file. Variable_headingsv2.txt - variable names.