Investigating Health Equity and Healthcare Needs among Immigrant Women Using the Association Rule Mining Method

Abstract

Equitable access to healthcare services is a major concern among immigrant women. Thus, this study investigated the relationship between socioeconomic characteristics and healthcare needs among immigrant women in Taiwan. The secondary data was obtained from “Survey of Foreign and Chinese Spouses’ Living Requirements, 2008,” which was administered to 5848 immigrant women by the Ministry of the Interior, Taiwan. Additionally, descriptive statistics and significance tests were used to analyze the data, after which the association rule mining algorithm was applied to determine the relationship between socioeconomic characteristics and healthcare needs. According to the findings, the top three healthcare needs were providing medical allowances (52.53%), child health checkups (16.74%), and parental knowledge and pre- and post-natal guidance (8.31%). Based on the association analysis, the main barrier to the women’s healthcare needs was “financial pressure.” This study also found that nationality, socioeconomic status, and duration of residence were associated with such needs, while health inequality among aged immigrant women was due to economic and physical factors. Finally, the association analysis found that the women’s healthcare problems included economic, socio-cultural, and gender weakness, while “economic inequality” and “women’s health” were interrelated.

The Impact of the Association between Cancer and Diabetes Mellitus on Mortality

“…Its application has been expanded to the medical field beyond the marketing field because it is effective in identifying patterns between diseases [ 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 ]. Support, confidence, and lift are the evaluation criteria of the Apriori algorithm [ 19 , 20 ]. In this study, support refers to the ratio of patients diagnosed with both diseases A and B among the study participants.…”

Oral health inequality among Indonesian workers in South Korea: role of health insurance and discrimination factors

“…Rare study has been done about health inequality among immigrants. Only one recent study which investigated the association between healthcare needs and socioeconomic status among immigrant women has been found [ 13 ]. According to the previous study, the main barrier to the immigrant women's healthcare needs was "financial pressure" and health inequality among aged immigrant women was due to economic factors.…”

“…To suggest potential factors explaining the inequality in SROH among migrant workers in South Korea, various social determinants have been examined in a previous studies including health insurance (HI), living difficulties related oral health (LDROH), oral health literacy (OHL), and discrimination [ 14 – 19 ]. From the findings of previous study [ 13 ], we derived the following concept explaining the complexity of oral health inequality; The magnitude and perhaps the nature of social determinants such as HI, OHL, and discrimination which affect migrants vary by their income level. Therefore, we made a conceptual framework in explaining the inequality in the SROH with the above mentioned social determinants (HI, LDROH, OHL, and discrimination), tested its significance, and finally constructed an analytical model to clarify the inequality in the SROH through above mentioned social determinants.…”