A Canadian Neighbourhood Index for Socioeconomic Status Associated with Early Child Development

Neighbourhoods encompass the social, institutional, and environmental determinants that influence the developmental health of the children who reside in them. A number of different socioeconomic indices have been developed to determine which neighbourhood-level indicators are most strongly associated with early child development outcomes in Canada. While these indices attempt to account for variability in outcomes across neighbourhoods, they have some important limitations: they either do not use indicators meaningful for families with young children or they are based on a large number of indicators. Here we describe how we developed a new index, the Canadian Neighbourhoods Early Child Development (CanNECD) SES Index, which addresses these limitations. Socioeconomic and demographic variables for custom-defined neighbourhoods were obtained from Canada Census and income tax data. Measures of developmental health came from the Early Development Instrument, a teacher-completed questionnaire measuring vulnerability across five developmental domains in kindergarten. We selected variables for the index based on empirical relationships to health and/or social determinants of health, then used exploratory factor analyses and linear regressions to choose ten variables that maximized explanatory power and interpretability for developmental health. The CanNECD SES Index accounts for 32% of the variance in neighbourhood-level overall vulnerability across developmental domains, whereas existing indices account for 17% or less. Analyses within individual Canadian provinces indicate that the explanatory power of our index ranges from 13 to 42%. This new tool will help us understand patterns of children’s developmental health as they relate to social determinants of health. It can be used in combination with other datasets to examine neighbourhood effects on children’s developmental health outcomes.