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Development of an international scale of socio-economic position based on household assets
BACKGROUND: The importance of studying associations between socio-economic position and health has often been highlighted. Previous studies have linked the prevalence and severity of lung disease with national wealth and with socio-economic position within some countries but there has been no system...
Autores principales: | , , , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
BioMed Central
2015
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4578326/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26396585 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12982-015-0035-6 |
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author | Townend, John Minelli, Cosetta Harrabi, Imed Obaseki, Daniel O. El-Rhazi, Karima Patel, Jaymini Burney, Peter |
author_facet | Townend, John Minelli, Cosetta Harrabi, Imed Obaseki, Daniel O. El-Rhazi, Karima Patel, Jaymini Burney, Peter |
author_sort | Townend, John |
collection | PubMed |
description | BACKGROUND: The importance of studying associations between socio-economic position and health has often been highlighted. Previous studies have linked the prevalence and severity of lung disease with national wealth and with socio-economic position within some countries but there has been no systematic evaluation of the association between lung function and poverty at the individual level on a global scale. The BOLD study has collected data on lung function for individuals in a wide range of countries, however a barrier to relating this to personal socio-economic position is the need for a suitable measure to compare individuals within and between countries. In this paper we test a method for assessing socio-economic position based on the scalability of a set of durable assets (Mokken scaling), and compare its usefulness across countries of varying gross national income per capita. RESULTS: Ten out of 15 candidate asset questions included in the questionnaire were found to form a Mokken type scale closely associated with GNI per capita (Spearman’s rank r(s) = 0.91, p = 0.002). The same set of assets conformed to a scale in 7 out of the 8 countries, the remaining country being Saudi Arabia where most respondents owned most of the assets. There was good consistency in the rank ordering of ownership of the assets in the different countries (Cronbach’s alpha = 0.96). Scores on the Mokken scale were highly correlated with scores developed using principal component analysis (r(s) = 0.977). CONCLUSIONS: Mokken scaling is a potentially valuable tool for uncovering links between disease and socio-economic position within and between countries. It provides an alternative to currently used methods such as principal component analysis for combining personal asset data to give an indication of individuals’ relative wealth. Relative strengths of the Mokken scale method were considered to be ease of interpretation, adaptability for comparison with other datasets, and reliability of imputation for even quite large proportions of missing values. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-4578326 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2015 |
publisher | BioMed Central |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-45783262015-09-23 Development of an international scale of socio-economic position based on household assets Townend, John Minelli, Cosetta Harrabi, Imed Obaseki, Daniel O. El-Rhazi, Karima Patel, Jaymini Burney, Peter Emerg Themes Epidemiol Methodology BACKGROUND: The importance of studying associations between socio-economic position and health has often been highlighted. Previous studies have linked the prevalence and severity of lung disease with national wealth and with socio-economic position within some countries but there has been no systematic evaluation of the association between lung function and poverty at the individual level on a global scale. The BOLD study has collected data on lung function for individuals in a wide range of countries, however a barrier to relating this to personal socio-economic position is the need for a suitable measure to compare individuals within and between countries. In this paper we test a method for assessing socio-economic position based on the scalability of a set of durable assets (Mokken scaling), and compare its usefulness across countries of varying gross national income per capita. RESULTS: Ten out of 15 candidate asset questions included in the questionnaire were found to form a Mokken type scale closely associated with GNI per capita (Spearman’s rank r(s) = 0.91, p = 0.002). The same set of assets conformed to a scale in 7 out of the 8 countries, the remaining country being Saudi Arabia where most respondents owned most of the assets. There was good consistency in the rank ordering of ownership of the assets in the different countries (Cronbach’s alpha = 0.96). Scores on the Mokken scale were highly correlated with scores developed using principal component analysis (r(s) = 0.977). CONCLUSIONS: Mokken scaling is a potentially valuable tool for uncovering links between disease and socio-economic position within and between countries. It provides an alternative to currently used methods such as principal component analysis for combining personal asset data to give an indication of individuals’ relative wealth. Relative strengths of the Mokken scale method were considered to be ease of interpretation, adaptability for comparison with other datasets, and reliability of imputation for even quite large proportions of missing values. BioMed Central 2015-09-22 /pmc/articles/PMC4578326/ /pubmed/26396585 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12982-015-0035-6 Text en © Townend et al. 2015 Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. |
spellingShingle | Methodology Townend, John Minelli, Cosetta Harrabi, Imed Obaseki, Daniel O. El-Rhazi, Karima Patel, Jaymini Burney, Peter Development of an international scale of socio-economic position based on household assets |
title | Development of an international scale of socio-economic position based on household assets |
title_full | Development of an international scale of socio-economic position based on household assets |
title_fullStr | Development of an international scale of socio-economic position based on household assets |
title_full_unstemmed | Development of an international scale of socio-economic position based on household assets |
title_short | Development of an international scale of socio-economic position based on household assets |
title_sort | development of an international scale of socio-economic position based on household assets |
topic | Methodology |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4578326/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26396585 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12982-015-0035-6 |
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