Clustering of Socioeconomic Data in Hong Kong for Planning Better Community Health Protection

Zhe Huang, Emily Ying Yang Chan, Chi Shing Wong and Benny Chung Ying Zee
Additional contact information
Zhe Huang: Collaborating Centre for Oxford University and CUHK for Disaster and Medical Humanitarian Response (CCOUC), The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China
Emily Ying Yang Chan: Collaborating Centre for Oxford University and CUHK for Disaster and Medical Humanitarian Response (CCOUC), The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China
Chi Shing Wong: Collaborating Centre for Oxford University and CUHK for Disaster and Medical Humanitarian Response (CCOUC), The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China
Benny Chung Ying Zee: Centre for Clinical Research and Biostatistics (CCRB), The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China

IJERPH, 2021, vol. 18, issue 23, 1-21

Abstract: The concept of socioeconomic vulnerability has made a substantial contribution to the understanding and conceptualization of health risk. To assess the spatial distribution of multi-dimensional socioeconomic vulnerability in an urban context, a vulnerability assessment scheme was proposed to guide decision-making in disaster resilience and sustainable urban development to reduce health risk. A two-stage approach was applied in Hong Kong to identify subgroups among Tertiary Planning Units (TPU) (i.e., the local geographic areas) with similar characteristics. In stage 1, principal components analysis was used for dimension reduction and to de-noise the socioeconomic data for each TPU based on the variables selected, while in stage 2, Gaussian mixture modeling was used to partition all the TPUs into different subgroups based on the results of stage 1. This study summarized socioeconomic-vulnerability-related data into five principal components, including indigenous degree, family resilience, individual productivity, populous grassroots, and young-age. According to these five principal components, all TPUs were clustered into five subgroups/clusters. Socioeconomic vulnerability is a concept that could be used to help identify areas susceptible to health risk, and even identify susceptible groups in affluent areas. More attention should be paid to areas with high populous grassroots scores and low young-age score since they were associated with a higher mortality rate.

Keywords: socioeconomic vulnerability; Health-EDRM; Hong Kong; cluster analysis; mortality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/18/23/12617/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/18/23/12617/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:18:y:2021:i:23:p:12617-:d:691504

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().