ABSTRACT

Administrators often find it useful to combine several indicators to form a single measure. For example, one indicator is rarely adequate to measure a community’s need for health services, the amount of crime in a neighborhood, or the level of sanitation. To measure the health status of a neighborhood, an administrator would want to use more than one indicator of a disease or condition and would combine several indicators into a composite measure called an index. Index is a term for a set of variables used as a measure for a more abstract concept. Each variable is called an item or indicator; an index will be composed of two or more items or indicators.