The data have been compiled from a number of sources.
These include:
The proportion of adults names for which we have been able to access data varies from country to country. In each country we have scaled up our counts of each name according to the proportion of the adults names for which we do not have information. This ensures that the counts are not affected by the source of the data.
In Italy and Spain, where telephone subscriber lists are the chief data source, female names are somewhat under-represented so we have scaled these up by proportionately more than males using tables which give the gender of each personal name.
By these methods we believe that we have been able to make the data comparable between countries.
However it is important to bear in mind that because French data is based on births and deaths our data tends to under-estimate the proportion of ‘immigrant’ names as compared with other countries. Likewise in the Netherlands, where personal names originate from the counts of children’s names, there is a lower than average comparability between the counts for personal names and those for other countries.
With the exception of France the data contains information about the names of people living in the country at a point in time during the last five years.
