Given that the General Law for Social Development sets forth that poverty measurement shall consider the multidimensional nature of poverty,CONEVAL created the Social Gap Index, incorporating indicators for education, access to health services, basic household services, quality and spaces of the dwelling, and home assets.

The Social Gap Index is a weighted measurement that summarizes four social deprivation indicators (education, health, house hold services and housing spaces) into a single index whose purpose is to arrange the observation units according to the social deprivation.

This index’s estimation has as its source of information the 2nd Population and Housing Count (ITER 2005) “Main Results by Locality, 2005” and was elaborated under the principal components statistical technique, which allows summarizing into an aggregated indicator the different dimensions of the phenomenon being studied. The social gap was calculated for three levels of geographic aggregation: state, municipal and locality.

The Social Gap Index estimation results are presented in three strata. Stratification is used based on the methodology by Dalenius & Hodges, given that it allows units to be as homogeneous as possible within each stratum and as different as possible between strata. The five strata the index is divided into are: very low, low, medium, high and very high social gap.