Socio-economical indexes in surveys for comparisons between countries

The study of socio-economic inequalities from a cross-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 (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 (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 previous computation, which is justified and explained 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 non linear 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, as the new strategy for weighting the observed indicators entering the index enhances its power to detect inequalities.