Socio-economic indexes for individuals and families: exploring the ecological fallacy of Socio-Economic Indexes for Areas
Joanne Baker and Pramod Adhikari
Australian Bureau of Statistics
Contact Email: joanne.baker
abs.gov.au
The Australian Bureau of Statistics has used the Census of Population and Housing to calculate Socio-Economic Indexes for Areas (SEIFA) since 1991. The SEIFA indexes are a widely used measure of relative socio-economic status (SES) at a small area level. The indexes rank and identify areas that are relatively more, or less, disadvantaged. They also provide contextual information about the area in which a person lives.
In some research, SEIFA has been used to indicate the SES of individuals within an area. However, within any area there will be individuals and sub-populations which have very different characteristics to the overall population. Making judgments about individuals based on an area level measure like SEIFA may create an ecological fallacy.
This paper investigates the ecological fallacy of using SEIFA as a proxy for individual and family level SES. We begin by creating an individual and family level socio-economic index using the same variable selection and methodology as is used for SEIFA. By comparing these two new indexes with the analogous SEIFA scores we find a large amount of heterogeneity in the SES of individuals and families within small areas. This indicates that an ecological fallacy is created when SEIFA is used as a proxy for the SES of smaller groups within an area.
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