Development of a Canadian socioeconomic status index for the study of health outcomes related to environmental pollution
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Socioeconomic status (SES) is an important determinant of health and potential modifier of the effects of environmental contaminants. There has been a lack of comprehensive indices for measuring overall SES in Canada. Here, a more comprehensive SES index is developed aiming to support future studies exploring health outcomes related to environmental pollution in Canada. METHODS: SES variables (n = 22, Census Canada 2006) were selected based on: cultural identities, housing characteristics, variables identified in Canadian environmental injustice studies and a previous deprivation index (Pampalon index). Principal component analysis with a single varimax rotation (factor loadings ≥ │60│) was performed on SES variables for 52974 census dissemination areas (DA). The final index was created by averaging the factor scores per DA according to the three components retained. The index was validated by examining its association with preterm birth (gestational age < 37 weeks), term low birth weight (LBW, <2500 g), small for gestational age (SGA, <10 percentile of birth weight for gestational age) and PM2.5 (particulate matter ≤ 2.5 μm) exposures in Edmonton, Alberta (1999-2008). RESULTS: Index values exhibited a relatively normal distribution (median = 0.11, mean = 0.0, SD = 0.58) across Canada. Values in Alberta tended to be higher than in Newfoundland and Labrador, Northwest Territories and Nunavut (Pearson chi-square p < 0.001 across provinces). Lower quintiles of our index and the Pampalon's index confirmed know associations with a higher prevalence of LBW, SGA, preterm birth and PM2.5 exposure. Results with our index exhibited greater statistical significance and a more consistent gradient of PM2.5 levels and prevalence of pregnancy outcomes. CONCLUSIONS: Our index reflects more dimensions of SES than an earlier index and it performed superiorly in capturing gradients in prevalence of pregnancy outcomes. It can be used for future research involving environmental pollution and health in Canada.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".