View report page

5
An additional advantage in the use of the National
Register populations is that these consist of habitual
residents in each locality and not merely of the
persons who happened to be present therein on a
certain date. The deaths tabulated from the year
1911 onwards are also those of habitual residents
only, and therefore the use hitherto of populations
which in certain cases included very large institutional
elements chiefly composed of non-residents introduced
in these cases serious errors into the rates calculated
from them, as pointed out in the Registrar General's
Annual Reports. This source of error now of course
disappears for the time being, and in such districts an
unavoidable break in the continuity of the previously
misleading rates will result. In any case, however,
the maintenance of continuity is under present circumstances
obviously impossible, and it is felt that the
present estimates will furnish death rates calculated
to indicate as nearly as may be the health conditions
of the civil population.
The method by which the estimates of civil population
have been derived from the National Register
returns may now be described.
The ratio of the total population, less the males
aged 15 to 65 years, to the number of females aged 15 to
65 years at the date of the census, was calculated for
each administrative area, and this ratio was applied to
the number of females on the National Register; the
resulting product plus the number of males aged 15 to
65 years on the National Register was taken to be
the number of the civil population of the district. A
small adjustment was necessary in order to make the
sum of the estimates for the several districts equal to
the estimate for the country as a whole, made on the
same basis. Further, the population in institutions
was not registered and this (taken to be the same in
the aggregate for England and Wales as at census
date) together with a. number of persons of no fixed
abode were distributed evenly over the whole country.