Ethnicity of the deceased person: further background

Releasing the first results

At an Ethnic and Health Research conference in Edinburgh in November 2012, National Records of Scotland’s (NRS)’s Vital Events Statistician presented a summary of the results of the first six months’ collection of the data. The full presentation can be found on The statistics that have been published section of this website. This showed that:

• 27,920 deaths were registered from January to June 2012;
• an ethnic group was recorded in 26,910 cases (96.4 per cent);
• the ethnic group was a ‘White’ one in 26,750 cases (95.8 per cent) and a ‘non-White’ one in 160 cases (0.6 per cent);
• the informant was not willing to provide the information in 867 cases (3.1 per cent); and
• the informant was unable to provide the information, because he/she did not know the deceased’s ethnic group, in 143 cases (0.5 per cent).

The Statistician commented that the non-White percentage appeared unexpectedly low (in comparison to, for example, a non-White figure of 3.2 per cent of the total population, from the 2011 Scottish Household Survey’s results). He wondered whether a ‘not willing to provide’ or ‘not known’ response could be more likely in the case of the death of a non-White person. He emphasised that any death rates estimated from these data would have to be used carefully, because the ‘non-White’ numbers would double if, say, a sixth of the ‘not willing / unable to provide’ deaths were actually deaths of non-White people. The Statistician referred to some possible future work. In due course, NRS would compare the ethnic group percentages (for some age-groups) in the 2011 Census and 2012 ‘deaths’ data. However, the results would have to be interpreted cautiously, because the apparent under-representation of an ethnic group in the ‘deaths’ data could be due to it having a lower death rate, or a higher ‘not willing / unable to provide’ rate, or a combination of those two factors. In the longer-term, NRS might try to compare individuals’ ethnic groups in the census and ‘deaths’ records, to observe (for example) if the same code was given in both cases, and what ethnicity was reported in the census in the case of the people for whom no ethnic group had been provided when their deaths were registered. (It should be noted that NRS had no way to assess the quality of the data until it did the work which is described in a paper which is available in The quality of the data for 2012 to 2014 section of this website)

The publication of the first year’s results

In August 2013, NRS published a summary of all the information that was collected in 2012, it is in Vital Events Reference Table 5.4 on this website. This showed that:

• 54,937 deaths were registered in 2012;
• an ethnic group was recorded in 53,067 cases (96.6 per cent);
• the ethnic group was a ‘White’ one in 52,732 cases (96.0 per cent) and a ‘non-White’ one in 330 cases (0.6 per cent);
• the informant was not willing to provide the information in 1,639 cases (3.0 per cent); and
• the informant was unable to provide the information, because he/she did not know the deceased’s ethnic group, in 231 cases (0.4 per cent).

Given the uncertainty about the reliability of the figures (mentioned above), NRS put them on its website (along with many other statistics for 2012 that it published at the same time) but did not publicise their availability because it could not assess their quality (that could only be done when NRS did the work described in the paper which is available in The quality of the data for 2012 to 2014 section on this website.