Socio-economic Indexes in Surveys for Comparisons between Countries |
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Authors: | Batista-Foguet JM Fortiana J Currie C Villalbí JR |
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Institution: | (1) ESADE Business School, Universitat Ramon Llull, Avda De Pedralbes 60-62, 080034 Barcelona, Spain;(2) Department of Statistics, Facultat de Matemàtiques, Universitat de Barcelona, Spain;(3) Department of Community Health Sciences, University of Edinburgh, Scotland;(4) Institut Municipal de Salut Pública, Ajuntament de Barcelona, Spain |
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Abstract: | The study of socio-economic inequalities from across-national perspective has been hampered by the lack of adequate common
indices of socio-economic status that can be used in a self-report survey instrument. This paper examines the construction
and the properties of global social indexes in general, and of the Family Affluence Scale (henceforth FAS) in particular.
The paper proposes a new strategy for making comparisons of the global index with stratified data, building a revised FAS
based on Adapted Canonical Variate Analysis (henceforth ACVA). This alternative strategy for constructing a global index is
available in standard software, and the new proposal for stratified data only requires a simple program, which is justified,
explained and provided in the text. Data come from the 1998 Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children (HBSC), a WHO Cross-National
Study using cluster sampling of schoolchildren from five countries: Denmark, Latvia, Portugal, Scotland and the USA. The results
reveal that in every country we would have had a completely different evaluation of the three indicators of Family Affluence
if we had used either linear or nonlinear approaches to compute the global indexes. Moreover, Family Affluence comparisons
among countries shows that the relative contribution of the three indicators to the overall FAS, changes from country to country.
We conclude that separate indicators of Family Affluence are not equally relevant in each country and, as a consequence, do
not contribute equally to the global index. For cross-cultural studies, the strategy for constructing an index should be country
specific. The methodological developments presented in the paper open up opportunities to study socio-economic patterning
of health among young people in the developed world, since self completed surveys can now employ a common measure of family
material wealth. The findings show that the RFAS (Revised FAS) is a useful index of socio-economic status for use in national
and cross-national surveys of adolescent health and health behaviour. The new strategy for weighting observed indicators in
the index gives it enhanced power to detect in equalities. |
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Keywords: | canonical variate analysis health-behaviour optimal scaling socio-economic indexes social inequalities summated rating scale |
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