“Use of the Area Deprivation Index and Rural Applications in the Peer-Reviewed Literature” is now available on the Rural Health Research Gateway. The study is the latest project of the East Tennessee State University/NORC Rural Health Equity Research Center.
The Area Deprivation Index (ADI) was developed to capture area-level social deprivation
for use in policy and research. Researchers reviewed existing peer-reviewed literature
regarding the use of the ADI. They then conducted a quantitative analysis to compare
its use in rural versus urban communities.
“There is increasing interest in using these area-level measures of risk in policy
and practice, including the ADI,” said lead author Dr. Casey Balio. “While they are
being widely used, there is a need to better understand what we know about how they
relate to health outcomes and differ by important characteristics of individuals and
communities, including rurality.”
Researchers found that about a third of studies include ADI and a measure of rurality,
but none consider the relationship between ADI level and rurality.
“This review shows that while ADI is being used frequently in the scientific literature,
there is a great deal of heterogeneity in how it is operationalized and no evidence
of how it relates to rurality. These limitations in the larger body of evidence have
implications for what we know about how it may perform in research, policy, and practice,”
stated Balio.
The study’s authors concluded that future research is needed to understand how applications
of the ADI may differentially affect communities and individuals by rurality, race,
and ethnicity. The ETSU/NORC Rural Health Equity Research Center is a partnership
of the ETSU Addiction Science Center, the ETSU Center for Rural Health Research, and
the NORC Walsh Center for Rural Health Analysis and is one of eight federally funded
rural health research centers in the country. RHERC’s mission is to develop strategies
and recommendations for policymakers, rural health care providers, and rural communities
to mitigate the individual and community-level impacts of substance use disorder (SUD),
improve access to health care and social services, and improve population health.
This study was funded by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) and
the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) under the Rural Health Research
Grant Cooperative Agreement.