TY - JOUR T1 - Abbreviating the Wealth Index to Measure Equity in Health Programs More Easily JF - Global Health: Science and Practice JO - GLOB HEALTH SCI PRACT SP - 4 LP - 5 DO - 10.9745/GHSP-D-16-00028 VL - 4 IS - 1 AU - Thomas W Pullum Y1 - 2016/03/21 UR - http://www.ghspjournal.org/content/4/1/4.abstract N2 - Efforts to simplify the construction of the DHS wealth index are encouraged (while recognizing it is constructed differently in each country), but attempts to assess equity in health programs should bear in mind that it is not sufficient to calculate the wealth index just for the participants in the program. The quintile distributions can vary dramatically within sub-populations. Assessments of equity require knowledge of the distribution of potential participants as well as actual participants.See related articles by Chakraborty and by ErgoThis 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 … ER -