Abstract
Although there are a number of approaches to constructing a measure of multidimensional social exclusion in later life, theoretical and methodological challenges exist around the aggregation and weighting of constituent indicators. This is in addition to a reliance on secondary data sources that were not designed to collect information on social exclusion. In this paper, we address these challenges by comparing a range of existing and novel approaches to constructing a composite measure and assess their performance in explaining social exclusion in later life. We focus on three widely used approaches (sum-of-scores with an applied threshold; principal component analysis; normalisation with linear aggregation), and three novel supervised machine-learning based approaches (least absolute shrinkage and selection operator; classification and regression tree; random forest). Using an older age social exclusion conceptual framework, these approaches are applied empirically with data from Wave 1 of The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA). The performances of the approaches are assessed using variables that are causally related to social exclusion.
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Data availability and material
Wave 1 of TILDA data is publicly accessible through the Irish Social Science Data Archive (ISSDA) available at: https://www.ucd.ie/issda/data/tilda/
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Funding
The original research, which this article is based on, was funded by the Atlantic Philanthropies (Grant no. 22072). The authors would like to express their thanks to the TILDA team for their support and assistance during the completion of this research.
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All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation and data analysis were performed by SK, SON, with conceptual support and guidance from KW. The first draft of the manuscript was written by SK and all authors commented on subsequent versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Keogh, S., O’Neill, S. & Walsh, K. Composite Measures for Assessing Multidimensional Social Exclusion in Later Life: Conceptual and Methodological Challenges. Soc Indic Res 155, 389–410 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-021-02617-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-021-02617-7