Smoking prevalence and deprivation (SALSUS)

The Scottish Schools Adolescent Lifestyle and Substance Use Survey (SALSUS) is a continuation of a long established series of national surveys on smoking, drinking and drug use. These were carried out jointly in Scotland and England between 1982 and 2000, to provide a national picture of young peoples' smoking (from 1982), drinking (from 1990), and drug use (from 1998) behaviours within the context of other lifestyle, health and social factors. Since 2002, Scotland has developed its own, more tailored survey, known as SALSUS. SALSUS is a self-completion survey of 13 and 15 year olds administered in school by teachers in a mixed ability class, under exam conditions. The 2018 survey was the last SALSUS in its existing format. For more information, including the technical details visit our website.

Deprivation

The Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD) identifies small area concentrations of multiple deprivation across all of Scotland in a consistent way. It allows effective targeting of policies and funding where the aim is to wholly or partly tackle or take account of area concentrations of multiple deprivation.

SIMD ranks small areas (called data zones) from most deprived (ranked 1) to least deprived (ranked 6,976). People using SIMD will often focus on the data zones below a certain rank, for example, the 5%, 10%, 15% or 20% most deprived data zones in Scotland. In this instance the datazones have been split into quintiles with SIMD quintile 1 representing the most deprived areas and SIMD quintile 5 representing the least deprived areas.