ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors cover the methods in study design and analysis for disparity surveillance or assessment. Regardless of the study design, most surveillance studies use the same set of statistical measures. The authors briefly describe some of the common measures of health disparities, and then proceed with examples on how to guide disparities assessment. Although mean is used for a number of health indicators, such as birth weight and body mass index, most comparisons of health disparities are based on rates. The authors describe primarily the rate and its various measures for group comparison. They define health disparity surveillance as using existing administrative or observational data to systematically detect health disparities along major disparity dimensions, such as race and ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status (SES), and rurality. Temporal patterns are an important aspect of disparity surveillance. Different from a research study, disparity surveillance need a scope to frame surveillance questions.
