Socio-economic status evaluation in medicine: Are we doing the right thing in medical research?
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15511/tahd.15.01004Keywords:
Socioeconomic status, social class, medical researchAbstract
Since our understanding of the society in the field of medicine evolves, the relation of socioeconomic markers with parameters of health attracts our attention. Accordingly, our desire to investigate how heath is affected by these markers is also increasing rapidly. However our experiences in this scientific field, which is recently added to our academic concerns, are still quite limited. While Composite scales are widely used in developed countries, the heterogeneous structure of the population living in different regions in our country makes it difficult to use this scales. On the other hand proxy questions are frequently used in the Turkish literature, but there are difficulties in associating these questions with the actual regarding socioeconomic status of the investigated population. Changes in the demands of the population are also forcing to changes in our value of judgement in evaluating the socioeconomic status. While ten years ago the assessment of monthly income and educational status was enough for the evaluation of socioeconomic status, today even the chosen residential areas and social circle became important. Additionally having correctly formatted proxy questions on hand will decrease researchers concerns regarding this issue. The aim of this article is to improve our understanding towards analyzing relations between health concerns and socioeconomic variables and to help in achieving correct interferences and results.