• Journal of Cadastre & Land InformatiX
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• v.48 no.2
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• pp.197-211
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• 2018

We conducted this research to examine how well regional housing prices are suited to use as an alternative to conventional census-based regional deprivation indices in health and medical geography studies. To examine the relative performance of mean regional housing prices compared to conventional census-based regional deprivation indices, we compared several multilevel logistic regression models, where the first level was individuals and the second was health districts in the Seoul Metropolitan Area (SMA) in Korea, for the sake of adjusting the regional clustering tendency of unknown factors. In these models, we predicted two dichotomous variables that represented individuals' after-lunch tooth brushing behavior and use of dental floss by individual characteristics and regional indices. Then, we compared the relative predictive performance of the models using the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) and Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC). The results from the estimations showed that mean regional housing prices and census-based deprivation indices were correlated with the two types of dental health behavior in a statistical sense. The results also revealed that the model with mean regional housing prices showed smaller AIC and BIC compared with other models with conventional census-based deprivation indices. These results imply that it is possible for housing prices summarized using aerial units to be used as an alternative to conventional census-based deprivation indices when the census variables employed cannot properly reflect the characteristics of the aerial units.