Infante C, Schlaepfer L
Centro de Investigaciones en Salud Pública, Instituto Nacional de Salud Pública, Cuernavaca, México.
Salud Publica Mex. 1994 Jul-Aug;36(4):365-73.
The results presented here show that there is no single variable nor a particular set of variables which are ideal to stratify the Mexican population in socioeconomic terms. This means that it is necessary to select indicators appropriate to each case, taking into consideration their specificity of meaning, their meaning with regard to the study problem and, naturally, also the objective and conceptual framework of the research, in the present case, public health research. The selection of indicators needs to be based on practical/methodological and theoretical considerations. Some of these are discussed in the present paper. Regaining the conceptual meaning of the indicators is fundamental and this is why a discussion of the concepts of social class, social strata, social inequality and poverty was undertaken. The practical/methodological criteria which were examined, include such elements as the type of variable used (dichotomic, categorical, continuous, etc.). To this end, socioeconomic variables of the National Fertility and Health Survey were analyzed, as well as the variable "poverty", which was constructed with data from the National Household Income and Expenditures Survey. As a result, outlines were drawn for a better understanding, utilization and measurement of socioeconomic indicators in public health research in Mexico.
此处呈现的结果表明，不存在单一变量或特定的变量集能够在社会经济层面理想地对墨西哥人群进行分层。这意味着有必要根据具体情况选择合适的指标，要考虑到其含义的特殊性、与研究问题相关的意义，当然还有研究的目标和概念框架，在本案例中即公共卫生研究。指标的选择需要基于实践/方法学以及理论考量。本文将对其中一些进行讨论。重新明确指标的概念意义至关重要，这就是为何要对社会阶层、社会分层、社会不平等和贫困等概念展开讨论。所审视的实践/方法学标准包括所使用变量的类型（二分法、分类法、连续法等）等要素。为此，分析了国家生育与健康调查中的社会经济变量，以及利用国家家庭收入与支出调查数据构建的“贫困”变量。结果勾勒出了在墨西哥公共卫生研究中更好地理解、利用和衡量社会经济指标的轮廓。
