A Comparison of Neighborhood-Level Deprivation Measures: A Scoping Review and Reference Guide for Investigators (Preprint)
Year: 2023
Type: preprint
Abstract: BACKGROUND The measurement of neighborhood-level adversity, aimed at investigating the social determinants of health (SDOH) experienced in communities, has attracted increasing attention. However, the extent to which existing measures cover the broad spectrum of SDOH has not yet been assessed. OBJECTIVE This review compared the content of extant neighborhood-level SDOH measures and summarized the use of these measures in empirical research. METHODS To identify U.S.-based neighborhood-level adversity measures, we conducted a comprehensive search on PubMed and Google Scholar, identifying previous review articles published from 1990 to 2023, and complemented this search by manually examining the original articles of measure development. We used a modified framework of 14 domains of neighborhood-level adversity (i.e., income/wealth, migration, employment, housing, transportation, immigrant population, social environment, racial composition, telecommunication, demographic/family structure, education, health/care services, physical environmental, and other) to classify the content of each measure. Using Web of Science, we analyzed the frequency of peer-reviewed article citations for each measure. We identified 85 measures and categorized them into two groups: 42 with a specific name (e.g., Area Deprivation Index) and 43 with no specific name. RESULTS Most measures captured the domains of “income/wealth” (96.5% of the 85 measures included a relevant measurement indicator), “employment” (87.1%), “education” (83.5%), “housing” (64.7%), and “demographic/family structure” (60.0%). The most popular measures were the “Social Vulnerability to Environmental Hazards Index” (87.4 citations per year), “Neighborhood Concentrated Disadvantage” (77.6 citations per year), “Child Opportunity Index 2.0” (53.5 citations per year), “Baseline Resilience Indicators for Communities” (42.9 citations per year), and “Social Vulnerability Index” (36.0 citations per year). CONCLUSIONS A better understanding of the extent of coverage and frequency of utilization for U.S.-based neighborhood-level adversity measures will facilitate future clinical/health services research to select appropriate measures when assessing the effect of neighborhood-level SDOH on health outcomes.
Language: English
Subfield: Health
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
OpenAlex ID: W4386933069