Northern Ireland

The Poverty and Social Exclusion Survey 2012 included questions, first asked in 2002/3, designed to capture the impact of the ‘Troubles’ on people’s lives. In this presentation for the Knowledge Exchange Seminar Series, Mike Tomlinson presents the initial analysis of these findings. The 2012 results survey found that just under a half of all adults (45%) experienced either the death or injury of someone they knew personally. For more than a third of adults (35%), someone they knew was killed. With the exception of imprisonment, all of the conflict experiences are associated with a higher risk of poor physical and mental health and most were associated with lower life satisfaction. Download the powerpoint and paper below.

This statistical briefing note compares differences between Great Britain and Northern Ireland in items reported as ‘necessary’ using the harmonised UK Omnibus dataset. Heat maps and relative risk ratio calculations were carried out separately for all adult and child items and activities. No major differences are apparent between respondents.

The statistical briefing examines the implications of a programming error that resulted in higher than expected amounts of missing data in the ‘sort card’ sample of the June 2012 Northern Ireland Omnibus Necessities Module. It concludes that the missing data can be considered to be MAR (Missing At Random) and they are ignorable for analyses of the proportion of respondents considering an item or activity to be a necessity as long as both the missing data and the don’t knows are excluded from the numerator and denominator i.e. if the don’t knows are set to ‘missing’.

The overall level of relative poverty in Northern Ireland increased between 2010-11 and 2011-12, according to the latest edition of the Northern Ireland Poverty Bulletin. The bulletin contains headline poverty figures drawn from the latest Households Below Average Income datasets for the period April 2011 up to the end of March 2012.