Area-based socio-economic measures as tools for health disparities research, policy and planning.

This measures es on special the (ABSMs). contemporary issue of the ABSMs, Canadian use as of the Journal area-based name of Public suggests, socio-economic Health are focustools es on the contemporary use of area-based socio-economic mea ures (ABSMs). ABSMs, as the n me uggests, are tool that utilize information (often from the census) selected specifically to characterize the socio-economic profile of geographic areas rather than of individuals. Single-component measures, such as neighbourhood income, are a common example; multiple-component area-based measures of deprivation are another instance of ABSMs. Interest in such devices is not as recent as we may tend to assume. The tools of what was at the time the emerging science of statistics were being used in England by the second half of the nineteenth century to describe the geography of health, particularly by showing differences in mortality between urban and rural areas but also by demonstrating differences between wealthy and poor urban areas.1-2 By the early 20th century in the United States, where statistically-based empirical orientations to social science were taking root, there were numerous attempts to objectively categorize what had come to be called socio-economic status (SES).3 6 Chapin, for example, developed a four-component scale consisting of cultural possessions, effective income, participation in group activities, and material possessions "in order to permit the equating of these factors in experimental study." (ref. 4, p. 99) It is an index that has a familiar ring almost a century later. By the 1930s, again in the United States, this practical interest in statistics and geography saw the first use of census tracts in social analyses;78 and by the late 1950s, Coulter and Guralnick were reporting that census data were being used at census-tract level in conjunction with vital statistics to describe differences in mortality rates between socio-economic groups.9 At the same time, Farber and Osoinach (1959) had developed an index of socio-economic rank of census tracts using census data on occupation, education, income, and non-white population.10 While much of this history may be largely unknown today, there is no doubt that considerable interest in ABSMs has arisen over the