Methods in Social Epidemiology

Social epidemiology involves examining and understanding the influence of social circumstances and processes on patterns of health and ill health in populations, especially the unequal distribution of health. Socioeconomic inequalities in health are a major challenge for health policy. Monitoring the changes in the magnitude of these inequalities is essential to assess the effectiveness of health policy interventions. There is a wide variety of summary measures for the magnitude of socioeconomic inequalities in health. These measures choose different perspectives, and it is recommended to assess the magnitude of health inequalities based on a set of diverse measures that together cover all the relevant perspectives. Both simple and sophisticated summary measures are available for each of these perspectives The different measurements included in the course are:  - the slope index of inequality and the relative index of inequality - the concentration index - principal component analysis applied to socioeconomic status - the measurement of intersectionality including decomposition analysis and propensity score matching.