Constructing place specific measures of health and socio-economic inequality for metropolitan Vancouver

In recent decades researchers have used Census-based socio-economic models to explain why some people are healthier than others. Little attention has been directed to survey-based methods for quantifying socio-economic inequality due to the inherent subjectivity of individual responses in characterizing data. This thesis argues that this very subjectivity allows us to better understand and evaluate social gradients in health status. A survey instrument was developed and distributed to British Columbia’s Medical Health Officers (MHOs) as part of a methodology for identifying the socio-economic variables characteristic of local health outcomes specific to urban areas in British Columbia, Canada. A weighted Kappa test statistic and a GIS-based Multicriteria Analysis are used to evaluate the strength of the variables selected by the MHOs. This research demonstrates that place-specific and survey-based methods of constructing deprivation indices are effective strategies for identifying spatial distributions of health and socio-economic outcomes within urban areas in British Columbia.