This page describes the resources available in CIHI’s Measuring Health Inequalities toolkit to help you carry out descriptive analyses of health inequalities. These resources aim to aid users in carrying out a stratified analysis and quantifying inequalities using simple and complex measures of inequality.
Prepare data for analysis
Define your health indicator
CIHI’s Indicators web page provides definitions and methodologies for more than 100 CIHI indicators, including considerations such as the desired direction of the health indicator (e.g., whether higher or lower rates are desirable) and whether the indicator is routinely age-standardized or risk-adjusted.
Obtain your equity stratifier data
Use the approach you identified in the Planning phase to obtain your equity stratifier data:
- Resource: Equity Stratifier Inventory
Includes details on how to obtain embedded equity stratifiers available within selected CIHI and Statistics Canada health data.
Download the document (XLSX) - Resource: Area-Level Equity Stratifiers Using PCCF and PCCF+
Includes details on how to use an area-level approach for obtaining equity stratifier data. For example, PCCF+ can be used to assign area-level income quintiles based on postal code.
Download the document (PDF)
Categorize data into population subgroups
Categorize your data into population subgroups using the equity stratifier definition you specified in the Planning phase:
- Resource: Equity stratifiers web page
This page includes pan-Canadian guidance on how to use different equity stratifiers for reporting.
Go to the web page
Calculate stratified rates and summary measures of inequality
Calculate crude and age-standardized rates stratified by your chosen equity stratifier(s). Calculate summary measures of inequality using both absolute (difference-based) and relative (ratio-based) summary measures to quantify inequalities between groups:
- Resource: Calculating Stratified Rates and Inequality Measures: Methodology and Code in SAS and R
Contains formulas and CIHI’s SAS and R code for calculating stratified health indicator rates and 4 summary measures of inequality: rate ratio, rate difference, potential rate reduction and population impact number.
Download the document (PDF) - Resource: Interpreting Health Inequalities to Inform Action (Video)
Watch this video to understand how absolute and relative summary measures provide complementary information, and to learn about how the overall indicator rates impact the magnitude of inequality.
Go to the video