Constructing an Areabased Socioeconomic （构建一个成立社会经济）.pdf

Constructing an Area-based Socioeconomic Index: A Principal Components Analysis Approach* Vijaya Krishnan, Ph.D. Email: vkrishna@ualberta.ca Early Child Development Mapping Project (ECMap), Community-University Partnership (CUP), Faculty of Extension, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta T5J 4P6, CANADA © May 2010, V. Krishnan * An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Early Childhood Intervention Australia (ECIA) 2010 Conference, “Every day in every way: Creating learning experiences for every child”, National Convention Centre, Canberra, Australia, 20-22 May 2010 Constructing an Area-based Socioeconomic Status Index... Abstract This paper reviews methods to create a socioeconomic index that apply standardization procedures and factor scores, and discusses the advantages and disadvantages among methods. In the absence of individual data, ecological or contextual measures of socioeconomic status are frequently used to draw the relationship between socioeconomic inequalities and health outcomes. The paper focuses on the development of a socioeconomic index that can be used to differentiate disadvantaged areas from more privileged ones in a multivariate context. The index was derived from a Principal Components Analysis (PCA) of 2006 national census data from Alberta, at the Dissemination Area (DA) level. Data on 26 variables measuring multiple aspects of socioeconomic status (e.g., income, education, occupation, housing, family and household, ethnicity) were utilized to extract their underlying constructs. Se