Dear All,
thank you very much for your help.
I have followed the suggestion of trying a preliminary analysis using the
Principal Component Analysis but I have only
found a confirm of the primary importance of mortality and life expectancies
in defining the health status (these two indicators
are resulted to be very correlated with the first component).
I have applied this method to the Italian time serie from 1980 to 1998. So I
have the doubt if factor analysis is correct
when the units are represented by years. Does exist an alternative to
include time?
My final aim would be to obtain a quantitative measure of health: I wonder
if Principal Component Analysis is also able to
summarize the variables which determine the first factor into an overall
health index.
Waiting for your precious answers,
best regards (and sorry for my bad English).
Stefania
P.S. for Gill Lancaster : I think your list of references about deprivation
indexes would be very helpful.
Could you send me a copy, please?
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