the higher the incidence and severity of deprivation among children in a particular subgroup and the higher the prevalence of this household characteristic in the population of children the more this household characteristic will contribute to the overall adjusted deprivation headcount mo a downside of this weighted average approach is that the characteristics of highly deprived children who happen to be a very small subgroup in the population will appear to contribute relatively little to the national adjusted headcount ratio this helps identify particular dimensions that may drive the overall adjusted deprivation headcount rate given a particular cutoff