How to interpret the indicators

Income and employment domains are percentages of people who are deprived.

The other domains have a normal distribution centred on zero. Like Jarman and Townsend, a positive score is more deprived than average. The individual domains are transformed to a common metric and weighted before being combined to the Index of Multiple Deprivation.

Because the domains are measured in different ways it is safer to compare wards using ward rankings rather than scores. Ward scores may not be combined into a composite score other than the IMD.