Andrea Lopez and Dr. Lung-Chang “JoJo” Chien (both Epidemiology and Biostatistics) presented a poster at the 2026 American Public Health Association (APHA) annual meeting, titled “Beyond Equal Weighting: Enhancing the Predictive Capability of Socioeconomic Indices”. The Social Vulnerability Index (SVI) is widely used because it captures important social determinants of health, but it assigns equal weight and overlooks their contributions to specific health outcomes. The poster presentation demonstrated how to apply weighted quantile sum regression to construct a weighted SVI that retains the same 16 determinants and yields a better model fit than the standard SVI with 30 health outcomes.
