A Symmetric, Entropy-Based, Relative and Quasi-Absolute Measure of Health Disparities: An Example Using Dental Caries in U.S. Children and Adolescents

• Activity Number: 508
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 4, 2010 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Health Policy Statistics Section
• Author(s): Luisa N. Borrell*+ and Makram Talih
• Companies: Lehman College - CUNY and CUNY School of Public Health at Hunter College
• Keywords: Epidemiologic Methods ; Health Disparities ; Dental Caries ; Taylor series linearization ; Race/ethnicity ; Socioeconomic position

Abstract

While the health status of Americans has improved over time, this improvement has been unevenly distributed. Designing a measure that tracks the resulting disparities remains a challenge. We propose a new measure of health disparities, the Symmetrized Theil Index (STI).The STI is symmetric; relates to the Pearson's chi-square test of independence for binary data, and to the F-test in one-way analysis-of-variance for continuous data; and is both a relative and a quasi-absolute measure of health disparities. We apply the STI to data on dental caries for children and adolescents from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys (1988-1994 and 1999-2004). Although their oral health has generally improved, we find no change in the prevalence or severity of untreated tooth decay in children and adolescents between surveys in both the overall STI and its between-group component.