See related articles by Chakraborty and by Ergo
This issue of Global Health: Science and Practice (GHSP) includes 2 articles—one by Chakraborty and colleagues1 and the other by Ergo and colleagues2—that describe how the well-known Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) wealth index can be adapted for the purpose of assessing equity in health programs. DHS constructs the index by combining information about a large number of household assets in a principal components analysis, interpreting the first principal component as a continuous single dimension of wealth, and then identifying cut-points that break that scale into 5 segments, known as wealth quintiles.
The strategies used to adapt the DHS wealth index in the 2 GHSP articles are different from each other, but both are able to produce a good approximation to the wealth index and wealth quintiles with a much smaller …