Construction and Validation of an Individual Deprivation Index: a Study Based on a Representative Cohort of the Paris Metropolitan Area

Abstract

The association between health status and deprivation is well established. However, it is difficult to measure deprivation at an individual level and already-existing indices in France are not validated or do not meet the needs of health practitioners. The aim of this work was to establish a validated, easy-to-use, multidimensional, relevant index that was representative of the population in the Paris metropolitan area. From the SIRS 2010 cohort study, 14 socio-economic characteristics were selected: health insurance, educational background, socio-professional category, professional status, feelings of loneliness, emotional situation, household type, income, perceived financial situation, social support (support in daily life, financial and emotional), housing situation, and migration origin. In addition, a total of 12 health status, healthcare use, and nutrition-related variables were also selected. Content validity and internal validity of the index were explored. The 14 socio-economic indicators were associated to varying degrees with poorer health status, less use of healthcare, and poorer nutrition and were distributed across the 14 multiple-choice questions of the index. Each answer was rated from 0 to 2. The index value of 10 that isolates 20% of the most deprived individuals was used as threshold. “Being deprived,” as defined with this value, was significantly associated with 9 of the 12 studied health variables. This index could be a relevant instrument in the assessment of deprivation and social inequalities of health. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11524-022-00648-0.

Role of individual deprivation and community-level deprivation on suicidal behaviors: Insights from the UK Biobank study

“…We tried to develop an individual deprivation index than can provide comprehensive information on multiple aspects of socioeconomic deprivation. After reviewing previous research that had attempted to develop an individual deprivation index, we selected the sociodemographic factors that are hypothesized to be strongly associated with socioeconomic deprivation as predictors of objective poverty from the UK Biobank database: biological sex, housing condition, number of vehicles, educational qualification, current employment status, and overall subjective health rating ( Brown et al, 2023 ; Labbe et al, 2015 ; Moussaoui et al, 2022 ). As we tried to develop an indicator that could be applied to a wide range of database, we included indicators that are commonly used and can be easily assessed into the prediction model.…”