Research Methodology

Defining locations and boundaries

One of the key decisions to make for this research was providing location areas which would give focussed yet meaningful housing needs information. There are 3 towns and over 60 villages in the Braintree District which vary widely in size.

The three main towns and many of the larger villages already had well-defined location areas and data available with town & parish boundaries. However some of the very small parishes have been combined with other parish data in research such as the Census data collection. Some smaller parishes within the District also have one parish council for a number of parishes – such as Alphamstone & Lamarsh and Great Henny, Little Henny, Twinstead & Middleton.

The approach was taken that we would break the District down into 54 locations for this research. These are the three towns and 51 Parishes and 'Parish Clusters' – where a number of parishes have joined together to form one Parish Council.