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

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.

Health Disparity Resulting from the Effect of Built Environment on Temperature-Related Mortality in a Subtropical Urban Setting

“…The higher variability of the area-specific effect in the city periphery may be due to the lack of contiguous areas. Increased-risk small areas were also identified; these clusters of neighborhoods with high mortality (High-High) were located in the central part of Hong Kong ( Figure 4 b) and categorized as “suburban areas” in a previous study [ 45 ].…”

“…Table 1 presents a statistical description of the socioeconomic variables and environmental exposures tested. The five socioeconomic variables are the five principal components of socioeconomic vulnerability derived from Huang et al [ 45 ]. The annually averaged minimum temperatures (°C) in different small areas of Hong Kong ranged from 19.6 to 22.0.…”

“…The five principal components (PC) accounted for more than 77% of the variation, namely: (1) indigenous degree: the lack of access to international information; (2) family resilience: the status of lack of family support; (3) individual productivity: an individual’s education, occupation, and income in the subregion; (4) populous grassroots: the situation of lack of home ownership; and (5) young age: youthfulness. The representativeness and detailed method of construction of the five principal components in the setting of the Hong Kong population were previously reported in [ 45 ].…”