ArticleEpidemiology (Cambridge, Mass.)2015
Lies, Damned Lies, and Health Inequality Measurements: Understanding the Value Judgments.
Article in Epidemiology (Cambridge, Mass.), 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 35 papers.
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Who cites it
35 citing papers in PubMed.
- Measuring and decomposing income inequalities in child and adolescent mental health in the UK.The European journal of health economics : HEPAC : health economics in prevention and care · 2026Article
- Income-Related Inequalities in Future Health Prospects.Health economics · 2025Article
- Observational
- Revisiting a decade of inequality in healthcare financial burden in Cambodia, 2009-19: trends, determinants and decomposition.International journal for equity in health · 2024Article
- Inequality in Childhood Immunization Coverage: A Scoping Review of Data Sources, Analyses, and Reporting Methods.Vaccines · 2024Article
- Evaluating Effects of Multilevel Interventions on Disparity in Health and Healthcare Decisions.Prevention science : the official journal of the Society for Prevention Research · 2024Article
- Critical interactions between race and the highly granular area deprivation index in liver transplant evaluation.Clinical transplantation · 2023Article
- Differences in self-reported health between low- and high-income groups in pre-retirement age and retirement age. A cohort study based on the European Social Survey.Health policy OPEN · 2022Article
- When the technical is also normative: a critical assessment of measuring health inequalities using the concentration index-based indices.Population health metrics · 2022Review
- Article
- Does comprehensive education reduce health inequalities?SSM - population health · 2021Article
- Index-Based Inequality in Quality of Care: An Empirical Comparison of Apples and Pears.Clinical epidemiology · 2021Article
- Health Inequality Analysis in Europe: Exploring the Potential of the EQ-5D as Outcome.Frontiers in public health · 2021Article
- The Income Gradient in Mortality during the Covid-19 Crisis: Evidence from Belgium.Journal of economic inequality · 2021Article
- Social policies and change in education-related disparities in mortality in Japan, 2000-2010.SSM - population health · 2020Article
- Inequality of opportunities in health and death: an investigation from birth to middle age in Great Britain.International journal of epidemiology · 2020Article
- Measuring the Magnitude of Health Inequality Between 2 Population Subgroup Proportions.American journal of epidemiology · 2020Article
- Progress against inequalities in mortality: register-based study of 15 European countries between 1990 and 2015.European journal of epidemiology · 2019Article
- Defining health and health inequalities.Public health · 2019Review
- Monitoring health inequalities when the socio-economic composition changes: are the slope and relative indices of inequality appropriate? Results of a simulation study.BMC public health · 2019Article
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3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Measuring and monitoring socioeconomic health inequalities are critical for understanding the impact of policy decisions. However, the measurement of health inequality is far from value neutral, and one can easily present the measure that best supports one's chosen conclusion or selectively exclude measures. Improving people's understanding of the often implicit value judgments is therefore important to reduce the risk that researchers mislead or policymakers are misled. While the choice between relative and absolute inequality is already value laden, further complexities arise when, as is often the case, health variables have both a lower and upper bound, and thus can be expressed in terms of either attainments or shortfalls, such as for mortality/survival.We bring together the recent parallel discussions from epidemiology and health economics regarding health inequality measurement and provide a deeper understanding of the different value judgments within absolute and relative measures expressed both in attainments and shortfalls, by graphically illustrating both hypothetical and real examples. We show that relative measures in terms of attainments and shortfalls have distinct value judgments, highlighting that for health variables with two bounds the choice is no longer only between an absolute and a relative measure but between an absolute, an attainment- relative and a shortfall-relative one. We illustrate how these three value judgments can be combined onto a single graph which shows the rankings according to all three measures, and illustrates how the three measures provide ethical benchmarks against which to judge the difference in inequality between populations.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.