Development of an international scale of socio-economic position based on household assets

BACKGROUND: The importance of studying associations between socio-economic position and health has often been highlighted. Previous studies have linked the prevalence and severity of lung disease with national wealth and with socio-economic position within some countries but there has been no systematic evaluation of the association between lung function and poverty at the individual level on a global scale. The BOLD study has collected data on lung function for individuals in a wide range of countries, however a barrier to relating this to personal socio-economic position is the need for a suitable measure to compare individuals within and between countries. In this paper we test a method for assessing socio-economic position based on the scalability of a set of durable assets (Mokken scaling), and compare its usefulness across countries of varying gross national income per capita. RESULTS: Ten out of 15 candidate asset questions included in the questionnaire were found to form a Mokken type scale closely associated with GNI per capita (Spearman's rank rs = 0.91, p = 0.002). The same set of assets conformed to a scale in 7 out of the 8 countries, the remaining country being Saudi Arabia where most respondents owned most of the assets. There was good consistency in the rank ordering of ownership of the assets in the different countries (Cronbach's alpha = 0.96). Scores on the Mokken scale were highly correlated with scores developed using principal component analysis (rs = 0.977). CONCLUSIONS: Mokken scaling is a potentially valuable tool for uncovering links between disease and socio-economic position within and between countries. It provides an alternative to currently used methods such as principal component analysis for combining personal asset data to give an indication of individuals' relative wealth. Relative strengths of the Mokken scale method were considered to be ease of interpretation, adaptability for comparison with other datasets, and reliability of imputation for even quite large proportions of missing values.