Compare methods

	Social Vulnerability Index	Area Deprivation Index
Field	Social Epidemiology	Social Epidemiology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2011	2003
Originator	Barry Flanagan et al. (CDC/ATSDR); Susan Cutter, Bryan Boruff & W. Lynn Shirley (SoVI)	Gopal K. Singh; Amy J. H. Kind & William R. Buckingham (Neighborhood Atlas)
Type	Composite percentile-rank index of community social vulnerability	Composite area-level socioeconomic deprivation index
Seminal source	Flanagan, B. E., Gregory, E. W., Hallisey, E. J., Heitgerd, J. L., & Lewis, B. (2011). A Social Vulnerability Index for Disaster Management. Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, 8(1), Article 3.	Singh, G. K. (2003). Area Deprivation and Widening Inequalities in US Mortality, 1969-1998. American Journal of Public Health, 93(7), 1137-1143.
Aliases	SVI, CDC SVI, CDC/ATSDR Social Vulnerability Index, Community Vulnerability Index	ADI, Neighborhood Deprivation Index, Singh Area Deprivation Index, Neighborhood Atlas ADI
Related	4	4
Summary	The Social Vulnerability Index (SVI) measures how vulnerable a community is to the harmful effects of disasters and public-health emergencies, based on the social and economic characteristics of the people who live there. The CDC/ATSDR version, introduced by Flanagan and colleagues in 2011, percentile-ranks census variables, groups them into themes (socioeconomic status, household composition and disability, racial and ethnic minority status and language, and housing type and transportation), and aggregates them into an overall ranking for each census tract or county. It builds on the broader social-vulnerability concept developed by Cutter, Boruff, and Shirley, whose 2003 Social Vulnerability Index to environmental hazards (SoVI) used factor analysis to show that susceptibility to disaster losses is socially patterned. The SVI is widely used to plan disaster response, allocate resources, and target public-health interventions toward the communities least able to cope.	The Area Deprivation Index (ADI) summarizes the socioeconomic disadvantage of a small geographic area, such as a census block group, into a single rankable score built from census indicators of income, education, employment, and housing. Gopal Singh constructed the modern US version in 2003, combining seventeen census measures with factor-analytic weights to show that area deprivation gradients in US mortality widened substantially between 1969 and 1998. Amy Kind and William Buckingham later made the index broadly usable through the Neighborhood Atlas, which publishes ADI rankings (national percentiles and state deciles) at the block-group level so researchers and clinicians can attach a neighborhood-disadvantage value to any address. The ADI sits alongside relatives such as the British Townsend and Carstairs indices in a family of composite area-deprivation measures.