The geo-systemic model and mortality in Ubon-Ratchathani

The Thailand 'Rural Data Base' includes a number of variables in the social, economic, services, housing, agriculture and health fields. This data base comes from a survey at the village level. There are weaknesses in the data base--inaccuracies, missing data, etc ... that make it difficult to discover the structures that theoretically exist in the data using direct analysis methods, like correlation analysis for instance. The 2383 villages of the province of Ubon-Ratchathani, in Thailand, are the units of this study. The objective is to uncover the hypothetical health disparities that exist among the villages and to devise a typology of villages that will show classes of villages that have significant problems and, also, classes of villages that could suggest concrete solutions and be used as models. Some variables of the data base are considered dependent (health indicators) and others are considered independent; they are used to build a model called 'geo-systemic' that is used to expose mortality differentials in Ubon-Ratchathani.