EVALUATION OF AN AREA-BASED MEASURE AS AN INDICATOR OF INEQUALITIES IN ORAL HEALTH

The literature on inequalities in health provides convincing evidence that lower socioeconomic groups have poor oral health when compared to higher socioeconomic groups. Since conventional measures of socioeconomic status such as occupation, income and education have a number of weaknesses which may limit their ability to describe and explain health inequalities, alternatives in the form of area-based measures are increasingly being used. In this paper, a conventional measure, household income, and an area-based measure of socioeconomic status are compared in terms of their ability to identify inequalities in oral health. The data used in the analysis were taken from a telephone interview survey of the oral health of older adults in the province of Ontario. Canada. While household income proved to be a marginally better predictor of these inequalities than the area-based measure, the latter had a number of distinct advantages from an epidemiological and planning perspective. Moreover. it identified variations in measures of oral health that were independent of household income, and the region of the province in which subjects lived.