Households Health Status in Saudi Arabia: Spatial Distribution and Association With Socioeconomic Factors

Abstract

This paper examines the spatial relationship between Saudi and non-Saudi people's health status and the socioeconomic composition of the neighbourhoods in which they live. Data were recorded from the National Population Health Survey (NPHS) performed by the Saudi General Authority for Statistics (GAS) in 2018. The survey counts 23,980,846 inhabitants grouped into 24,012 households who assessed their health status by gender and administrative region. Only people who are fifteen years of age and over and claiming poor health status were retained in the analysis. We used a Generalized Linear Spatial Model (GLSM) to study the relationship between Saudi and non-Saudi household’s health status and socioeconomic factors. A Gaussian process with a powered exponential spatial correlation function was introduced on the right-hand side of the model to consider the unexplained spatial variation in the data. The statistical results show the progressive increase in the number of Saudi and non-Saudi households claiming poor health status with the high Saudi unemployment rate, low average monthly income and high current daily smokers. The results of the statistical analyses show the wider potential of GLSM for analyzing data of this kind and the important risk of misleading interpretations when the non-spatial analysis is used on spatially structured data. The method of inference was Bayesian using Markov Chain Monte Carlo Implementation.