TY - JOUR
T1 - Testing the Expert Based Weights Used in the UK’s Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) Against Three Preference-Based Methods
AU - Watson, Verity
AU - Dibben, Chris
AU - Cox, Matt
AU - Atherton, Iain
AU - Sutton, Matt
AU - Ryan, Mandy
N1 - The paper has benefitted from helpful comments and suggestions from Koen Decancq, Rainer Schulz, and participants at the Weighting in Multidimensional Measures workshop at OPHI, Oxford, the Overseas Development Workshop at ODI, London, seminar participants at Universiteit Antwerpen, and conference participants at New Directions in Welfare III, Paris. Any errors or omissions, of course, remain the responsibility of the authors. The project was funded by the Department of the Communities and Local Government. The Chief Scientist Office of the Scottish Government Health and Social Care Directorates funds HERU. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors only and not those of the funding bodies.
PY - 2019/8
Y1 - 2019/8
N2 - The Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD), used widely in England, is an important tool for social need and inequality identification. It summarises deprivation across seven dimensions (income, employment, health, education, housing and services, environment, and crime) to measure an area’s multidimensional deprivation. The IMD aggregates the dimensions that are differentially weighted using expert judgement. In this paper, we test how close these weights are to society’s preferences about the relative importance of each dimension to overall deprivation. There is not agreement in the literature on how to do this. This paper, therefore, develops and compares three empirical methods for estimating preference-based weights. We find the weights are similar across the methods, and between our empirical methods and the current IMD, but our findings suggest a change to two of the weights.
AB - The Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD), used widely in England, is an important tool for social need and inequality identification. It summarises deprivation across seven dimensions (income, employment, health, education, housing and services, environment, and crime) to measure an area’s multidimensional deprivation. The IMD aggregates the dimensions that are differentially weighted using expert judgement. In this paper, we test how close these weights are to society’s preferences about the relative importance of each dimension to overall deprivation. There is not agreement in the literature on how to do this. This paper, therefore, develops and compares three empirical methods for estimating preference-based weights. We find the weights are similar across the methods, and between our empirical methods and the current IMD, but our findings suggest a change to two of the weights.
KW - multidimensional index weights
KW - deprivation
KW - preferences
U2 - 10.1007/s11205-018-02054-z
DO - 10.1007/s11205-018-02054-z
M3 - Article
VL - 144
SP - 1055
EP - 1074
JO - Social Indicators Research
JF - Social Indicators Research
SN - 0303-8300
IS - 3
ER -
