Scottish Settlements Urban and Rural Areas in Scotland

Annex C - The methodology for 2000

The method

Calculating the population of each settlement

14. While the above work was progressing, it became clear from discussions with some users that they would find it extremely useful to have a population attributed to each settlement. Accordingly, a simple but crude method has been adopted. The Registrar General's mid-1999 population estimates for each council area were divided by the estimated number of residential addresses and the resulting persons per address ratio applied to the number of residential addresses in each postcode within the Council area. This estimate of the population for each postcode was summed for each settlement (and rounded to the nearest 10). These population estimates will be reviewed when 2001 Census results are available.

15. A further (small) number of settlements were then discarded as having an estimated population of less than 500. This is partly for presentation reasons and partly because the discarded settlements would not have been dissimilar to those that were discarded earlier for being below the 210 address threshold (paragraph 12).