Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
National Health Service identity numbers and that, if they were alive on
30 September 1939 and did not subsequently join the armed forces, their
NHS number was the National Registration number they were issued
on that date. That number identified the local authority area they were
then living in. Strachan showed that LS members who were in the north
of England in 1939 had worse health today, even if they were now living
in a healthier region.
7
This is where the Great Britain HGIS first became involved, as Stra-
chan's work was based on some broad assumptions about certain regions
being deprived, not on historical data about actual localities. We as-
sembled a range of data on unemployment, social class, and overcrowded
housing from the 1931 census and contemporary infant mortality data
from the 1931 census and supplied it to the LS support team, who made
our data a permanent part of the LS. The LS already contained two vari-
ables measuring individual health: whether or not the individual died
between 1981 and 1991, and whether or not individuals reported in 1991
that their lives were limited by long-term illness. We then ran new analy-
ses that related these two outcome variables to both individual-level data
on LS members' recent experience and the locality-level data from the
1930s we had contributed.
Two factors greatly complicated this work. First, we had no direct
access to the LS, instead supplying data to the LS support unit and speci-
fying analyses for them to run. Second, although the basic architecture
of local government remained constant between 1931 and 1939, consist-
ing of county boroughs, municipal boroughs, urban districts (all urban
units), rural districts, and London boroughs, the detailed geography
of local government was greatly changed through a rolling program of
county reviews: the 1931 census, which provided most of our explana-
tory variables, reported on 1,800 local government districts, but this
had been reduced to 1,472 by 1939. Further, many of the districts that
were not abolished were altered through boundary changes: 289 (19.6
percent) of the 1939 districts were new creations or had been affected by
boundary changes. To solve this problem, we constructed a geography
conversion table from the 1931 and 1939 reports plus the 1,805 boundary
changes listed for the intervening period using 1931 populations rather
than geographical areas.
8
By linking this table to 1931 census data, we
