Measuring health polarization with self‐assessed health data

Abstract

This paper proposes an axiomatic foundation for new measures of polarization that can be applied to ordinal distributions such as self-assessed health (SAH) data. This is an improvement over the existing measures of polarization that can be used only for cardinal variables. The new measures of polarization avoid one difficulty that the related measures for evaluating health inequalities face. Indeed, inequality measures are mean based, and since only cardinal variables have a mean, SAH has to be cardinalized to compute a mean, which can then be used to calculate an inequality measure. In contrast, the new polarization measures are median based and hence do not require to impose cardinal scaling on the categories. After deriving the properties of these new polarization measures, we provide an empirical illustration using data from the British Household Panel Survey that demonstrates that SAH polarization is also a relevant question on empirical grounds, and that the polarization measures are adequate to evaluate polarization phenomena whereas inequality measures are not adequate in these cases.

Inequality and polarisation in health systems’ responsiveness: A cross-country analysis

“…Ray (1994, 1999) and Duclos et al (2004) pioneered a different line of research focused on multi-group polarisation, and based on the concepts of within-group identification and between group alienation. 4 Within health economics, and following the strand of literature initiated by Foster and Wolfson (2010) and Allison and Foster (2004), Apouey (2007Apouey ( , 2010 proposed a specific measure of bi-polarisation for the case of self-assessed health. However, this is yet to find wide applicability in empirical work in this area.…”

“…We complement our approach to inequality measurement with a comparison of the degree of polarisation in the distribution of responsiveness. This is based on the indices proposed in Apouey (2007), which are applicable to the specific case of an ordered response variable.…”

Perception of the Rural and Urban Population about Healthcare in Romania during 1990-2010

“…These ideas were developed by Blair and Lacy (Blair & Lacy, 1996). Later, Apouey (2007) takes one of Blair-Lacy variation index and proved that this coefficient accomplishes some axioms which are specific to a polarization phenomenon. In the following we will designate by POA(p) the polarization indicator used by Apouey in 2007 to measure the polarization for self-assessed health (SAH) data having distribution p .…”

“…In the following we will designate by POA(p) the polarization indicator used by Apouey in 2007 to measure the polarization for self-assessed health (SAH) data having distribution p . More details about the concrete definitions of the indicators POA(p) and IGO(p) could be found in Apouey (2007), Giudici &Raffinetti (2011) andŞtefănescu (2015).…”

“…-For the statistical analysis of the polarization and inequality phenomena in healthcare were chosen two recent indicators (Apouey, 2007;Giudici & Raffinetti, 2011). The numerical calculus and also the graphs were programmed in Matlab language.…”