Abstract
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.
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Notes
In addition to weights, the choice of indicators, their transformed distributions and the aggregation function will also lead to implicit dimension weighting. See Decancq and Lugo (2013) for a discussion of these issues.
Equal weights may be explicit and normative because each dimension is believed to be equally important. Often, however, equal weighting is implicit because researchers want to avoid the contentious task of setting weights (OPHI 2012). Examples of multidimensional indices with equal weights include the Human Development Index (HDI) (UNDP 1990), the Human Poverty Indices (UNDP 1999), the Commitment to development index (Birdsall and Roodman 2003), the Multidimensional Poverty Index (Alkire and Santos 2010) and the New Zealand Index of Socioeconomic Deprivation (NZiDep) (Salmond et al. 2006).
The super output area level is a geographical area developed by the UK Office of National Statistics that contains on average 1500 people.
At each update, consideration has been given to changing the weights. Each time the consultation concluded that it was desirable to retain comparability across versions. Since IMD 2015 domain scores have been published which allow the construction of indices with alternative weights (Smith et al. 2015).
DCEs are based on Lancaster’s theory of value (Lancaster 1966) and can be used to elicit the relative importance of different product characteristics in the demand for a good or a service. DCEs have been applied in transportation research, and in environmental and health economics to elicit preferences for non-market goods (Kanninen 2007).
The hypothetical people are all adults: we take this perspective to avoid confounding respondents’ weights for the dimensions with the deprived individuals’ characteristics.
Included alongside the questionnaire was a covering letter explaining the use of the IMD and the relevance of this study and a prepaid return envelope was also included.
In Dibben et al. (2007) the DCE data are analysed using a probit model without random-effects.
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Acknowledgements
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.
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Watson, V., Dibben, C., Cox, M. et al. Testing the Expert Based Weights Used in the UK’s Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) Against Three Preference-Based Methods. Soc Indic Res 144, 1055–1074 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-018-02054-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-018-02054-z