Measuring the Socioeconomic Position of Adolescents: A Proposal for a Composite Index

Concepción Moreno-Maldonado (), Francisco Rivera (), Pilar Ramos () and Carmen Moreno ()
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Concepción Moreno-Maldonado: University of Seville
Francisco Rivera: University of Huelva
Pilar Ramos: University of Seville
Carmen Moreno: University of Seville

Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, 2018, vol. 136, issue 2, No 6, 517-538

Abstract: Abstract Despite evidence that socioeconomic inequalities impact health, studies on adolescents are limited and often show contradictory results depending on the measures employed to evaluate socioeconomic position. Little research has focused on the differential impact of each indicator on adolescent health, and few measures have been developed that provide a global evaluation. In this research, the relationship between classic socioeconomic indicators (education and occupation) and others that have been proposed more recently (family affluence scale and subjective family wealth) is analysed. A composite global score of socioeconomic position is also presented, based on the principal objective dimensions: parental education, parental occupation and family material wealth. Data were collected in Spain, in 2014, within the framework of the Health Behaviour in School-aged Children study, from a representative national sample of 8739 adolescents aged between 11 and 16 (mean = 13.72, SD = 1.71). The results contribute to resolving methodological difficulties associated with the evaluation of adolescent socioeconomic position, showing the unidimensionality of a global measure of objective wealth and demonstrating it to be a useful instrument for assessing the socioeconomic position in health inequalities research. The subjective perception of wealth presented a similar, and even higher, association with health than the objective measures. However, low correlations between perceived family wealth and the objective socioeconomic indicators (oscillating between .110 and .299) proved to measure a different construct, and thus was not included in the composite measure for assessing the adolescents’ objective socioeconomic position. Results highlighted the importance of including different indicators for measuring socioeconomic inequalities in adolescent health.

Keywords: Socioeconomic indicators; Adolescence; Parental occupation; Parental educational level; Subjective socioeconomic status; Family affluence (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
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DOI: 10.1007/s11205-017-1567-7

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