Compute Summary Measures of Health Inequality

Compute 21 summary measures of health inequality and its corresponding confidence intervals for ordered and non-ordered dimensions using disaggregated data. Measures for ordered dimensions (e.g., Slope Index of Inequality, Absolute Concentration Index) also accept individual and survey data.

healthequal - Calculating summary measures of inequality

The healthequal package provides computational tools for calculating 21 summary measures of health inequality.

Installation

You can install the released version of healthequal from CRAN with:

install.packages("healthequal")

The development version can be installed from GitHub with:

# install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("WHOequity/healthequal")

Measures of health inequality included in healthequal:

The following summary measures of health inequality are included in the healthequal package:

Simple measures

• Difference (d)
• Ratio (r)

Disproportionality measures (ordered dimensions)

• Absolute concentration index (aci)
• Relative concentration index (rci)

Regression-based measures (ordered dimensions)

• Slope index of inequality (sii)
• Relative index of inequality (rii)

Variance measures (non-ordered dimensions)

• Between-group variance (bgv)
• Between-group standard deviation (bgsd)
• Coefficient of variation (covar)

Mean difference measures (non-ordered dimensions)

• Mean difference from mean - unweighted and weighted (mdmu and mdmw)
• Mean difference from best-performing subgroup - unweighted and weighted (mdbu and mdbw)
• Mean difference from reference subgroup - unweighted and weighted (mdru and mdrw)
• Index of disparity - unweighted and weighted (idisu and idisw)

Disproportionality measures (non-ordered dimensions)

• Theil index (ti)
• Mean log deviation (mld)

Impact measures

• Population attributable risk (parisk)
• Population attributable fraction (paf)

Package data

The healthequal package comes with sample data for users to be able to test the package functions. The OrderedSample and NonorderedSample data contain data disaggregated by economic status and subnational region, respectively, for a single indicator.

Ordered and Nonordered data

data(OrderedSample)
head(OrderedSample)

data(NonorderedSample)
head(NonorderedSample)

Disagregated data

The OrderedSampleMultipleind and OrderedSampleMultipleind data contain disaggregated data by economic status and subnational region, respectively, for two indicators.

data(OrderedSampleMultipleind)
head(OrderedSampleMultipleind)

data(NonorderedSampleMultipleind)
head(NonorderedSampleMultipleind)

More info on the datasets

For information about the datasets, type the following commands, which will display the corresponding dataset help file:

?healthequal::OrderedSample
?healthequal::NonorderedSample
?healthequal::OrderedSampleMultipleind
?healthequal::NonorderedSampleMultipleind
?healthequal::IndividualSample

References:

Schlotheuber, A, Hosseinpoor, AR. Summary measures of health inequality: A review of existing measures and their application. Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2022;19(6):3697. doi:10.3390/ijerph19063697