[Proposal] Vulnerability Socio-economy index category codelist

[odscrachel]

What is your proposed change?

To create a new codelist for field se_category within the vulnerability component. This field appears in DDH_v0.2.xlsx. Link to spreadsheet

Title	Field name	Description	Type	Codelist
Socio-economy index category	se_category	Type of socio-economic index	string	Economy, Education, Environment, Governance and Institutional Capacity, Health, Infrastructure, Population, Food Security, Risk awareness, Civil Society and Social Capital, Composite index

Unresolved question

Are the se_characteristic or se_indicator fields needed that appear in DDH_v0.2.xlsx?

[odscrachel]

Should the title be 'Socio-economic index category'?

[matamadio]

See this issue already covering the change: #27

Vulnerability is split into independent sub-components

• Impact function (matheatical model)
• Socio-economic index (geodata or table)
• (2 more options in original Mover, not accounted for now)

The choice is exclusive, meaning if a dataset is an impact function, it can't be a socio-economic index.

[matamadio]

As from Mover, the SEI description can have 3 different levels of granularity:

• Category
  • Characteristics
  • Level 3

Example:

Social Vulnerability Category	Social Vulnerability Characteristic	Indicator Level 3
Vulnerable population	Social class (including caste, religious minority, ethnicity)	% of population part of a minority
	Gender – work opportunities	% of women in formal employment
		Ratio of average female to male income
	Gender – right to property	% of female population who own a house
		% of female population who own land
		% of female population who own a business
		% of female population owning a motorised vehicle
		% of female population with a mobile phone account
		% of female population owning an account with a financial institution
		% of household with a female head (female headed households))

In our proposal, we could keep only the first or the first two levels:

• Category
  • Characteristics

Full list:

Social Vulnerability Category	Social Vulnerability Characteristic
Vulnerable population	Social class (including caste, religious minority, ethnicity)
	Gender – work opportunities
	Gender – right to property
	Gender – Decision power on well-being
	Sexuality
	Age
	Disability
	Migration
	Involuntary displacement
Institutional Governance	Political stability and absence of violence and terrorism
	n. of acts of terror per 1000 population in a year
	Government Effectiveness
	Accountability
	Control of corruption
	Rule of Law
	Voice
Governance in Planning and Construction	Risk-informed building coded
	Enforcement of building codes
	Risk-informed planning
Civil Society and Social Capital	Social advocacy and civil society
Financial and Material welfare	Income -remittances
	Income –disposable income
	Income level
	Employment and employment security
	Financial dependency on environmental resources
	Access to credit
	Poverty
Financial and Material welfare	Access to insurance
	Capital assets
	Social Protection
Food Security	Availability
	Access
	Stability
	Utilization
Preparedness and Local Risk Awareness	Preventive measures
	Knowledge of local hazards
	Civil society and social capital in DRR
	Access to information in DRR
Access and Provision of services	Transports
	Water and waste water services
	Telecommunications
	Energy
	Solid waste management
	Affordability
	Access to Emergency Services
Knowledge and education	Education attainment
	Access to Education
	Technical skills and vocational training
	Existence of DRR curricula in schools
	Affordability
Health	General population health
	Health resources and expenditure

[duncandewhurst]

Where is the proposed codelist in the issue description drawn from?

[odscjen]

Where is the proposed codelist in the issue description drawn from?

The proposed codelist is a combination of values from Mover (see Mattia's comment 2 above this one) and GED4ALL. There was a discussion in the spreadsheet about which we should use, with GED4ALL being the one implied by the current documentation but then not wanting to break compatibility with Mover, hence the new proposal combining the two.

But if we're going to use a codelist that isn't an exact match to Mover AND we also want to keep the Socio-economic vulnerability characteristics (a sub-set of the categories) then we'll need to ensure that this is also compatible with both Mover and GED4ALL.

[duncandewhurst]

If compatibility with Mover and GED4ALL is important and we choose to create a new codelist, we should document mappings from the Mover and GED4ALL codelists to the RDLS codelist so that publishers using those systems know what values to use. Otherwise, each publisher will need to do the mapping themselves. That creates a maintenance overhead because we'll also need to keep the mapping and RDLS codelist up to date with any changes in the Mover and GED4ALL codelists.

An alternative approach is to allow classification against either Mover or GED4ALL using a flexible classifications object, e.g.

{
  "se_category": {
    "description": "Vulnerable population",
    "scheme": "Mover" 
  }
}

{
  "se_category": {
    "description": "Population",
    "scheme": "GED4ALL"
  }
}

@matamadio @stufraser1 would that approach work or would the use of different classifications for different datasets cause problems?

If we were to use the multi-level approach from Mover, having separate fields for category and characteristic would be difficult to validate. We'd need to write an additional check to ensure that the characteristic and category are coherent. An alternative approach would be to have a single field and use a code.subcode structure for the codelist, e.g. 'vulnerablePopulation', 'vulnerablePopulation.socialClass', 'vulnerablePopulation.gender' etc.

Interestingly, the Mover codelist already seems to have an extra level of subcodes within the characteristic level, e.g. Gender – work opportunities, Gender – right to property, and Gender – Decision power on well-being. I wonder why there isn't a similar breakdown for Sexuality, Age, Disability etc.

[matamadio]

If compatibility with Mover and GED4ALL is important and we choose to create a new codelist, we should document mappings from the Mover and GED4ALL codelists to the RDLS codelist so that publishers using those systems know what values to use. Otherwise, each publisher will need to do the mapping themselves. That creates a maintenance overhead because we'll also need to keep the mapping and RDLS codelist up to date with any changes in the Mover and GED4ALL codelists. An alternative approach is to allow classification against either Mover or GED4ALL using a flexible classifications object.

The flexible approach is more in line with what we discussed for taxonomy implementation (see #14, #18).

Interestingly, the Mover codelist already seems to have an extra level of subcodes within the characteristic level, e.g. Gender – work opportunities, Gender – right to property, and Gender – Decision power on well-being. I wonder why there isn't a similar breakdown for Sexuality, Age, Disability etc.

I just added the first ones, but the Indicator Level 3 list goes on for all the Social Vulnerability Characteristic - see last tab in the excel reference from the pre-review version.

[stufraser1]

@matamadio @stufraser1 would that approach work or would the use of different classifications for different datasets cause problems?

Providing users the option to use different classifications is what is being proposed for exposure taxonomies as Mat says above. It is also the direction we seem to be going in proposing open codelist in #5, so we should be consistent. Advantage of this is we enable more data to be coded using RDLS standard, but while we can encourage users to use consistent taxonomies in each component, we're not increasing data consistency by obliging people to use those.

[duncandewhurst]

Great. Shall we move this to agreed and ready on the basis of using a flexible classifications object then?