Estimating the 2011 total fertility rate for England & Wales and Scotland using alternative data sources

The use of the ONS statistical data in this work does not imply the endorsement of the ONS in relation to the interpretation or analysis of the statistical data. [...] The authors are grateful to the ONS Secure Research Service and National Records of Scotland for providing access to and clearance for outputs from our analyses of the ONS LS, the SLS, and the 2011 Census Secure Household Microdata samples for England & Wales and Scotland. [...] The main difference between the two methods is that for the longitudinal method, the events and risk time always come from the same people, while the cross-sectional method is analogous to the VR approach (Section 2.1) in that the numerator and denominator essentially come from different sources (birth registration data and census data). [...] To explore the discrepancies between the TFR estimates from the census microdata and VR, we calculated the ratios of the numerators and denominators of the ASFRs from the two sources, for all women6. [...] However, the denominator is the number of these women who are present at the time of the census, which is likely to underestimate the population at the mid-year due to non-response (and the very slight increase in population size that would have occurred in the intervening period).